Unless I’m mistaken (which I very well might be) there appears to be a new button in Windows Live Mail Wave 3 beta to allow users to easily create their own stationary.
I’m come across numerous posts in the public newsgroups from people asking how to do this. So here’s a very quick rundown using the new Windows Live Mail Wave 3 beta.
Firstly go to Tools/Options menu and select the Compose tab. As you will see from the screenshot above, there is a “Create New” button next to stationary. Click on this and the stationary creation wizard will open :-
Click “Next” and you will be taken to a screen asking what image you wish to use, where to position it, the background color for your email message etc :-
After you have customized your background click next to proceed to the next step of the wizard.
The next step lets you choose the default font, size and whether you wish bold or italics :-
Clicking next takes you to a screen where you can position your text. If you have included a picture, you might notice that the text will overwrite part of your background image and therefore be quite hard to view :-
By adjusting the left and top margins you an position your text to be displayed under your background image :-
Finally you need to give your stationary a name :-
click Finish and you’re done. Now all you need to do is to choose that stationary by clicking the checkbox next to either mail or news (or both if you so wish), clicking on the “Select” button and selecting the stationary you have just saved :-
And that’s all there is to it. If however you want to get a little more involved in with your stationary, then you can manually edit the resulting stationary file using your favorite editor such as Expression Web or Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. You will find your stationary saved under “My Documents\My Stationary” folder on your hard drive. The stationary file is a simple HTML document, so as long as you know some basic HTML then it’s very easy to amend. Here is the code generated by the stationary wizard :-
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<STYLE>
BODY {
font-family: Arial;
font-size: 12pt;
color: ffffff;
margin-top: 50 px;
background-position: top center;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY id="ridBody" background="MSNWindowsLive.jpg">
<BODY id="ridBody" bgcolor="c0c0c0">
</BODY>
</HTML>
Please note however that there is a bug in this code in that there should not be two opening <BODY> element tags.