Over the last few days the Mail Desktop team have been sending out beta invites, allowing more testers to try the new client. Lined up as the XP replacement to Outlook Express, and an upgrade to the basic Vista-only Windows Mail, Mail Desktop features support for Live Mail accounts, POP and IMAP accounts, newsgroups and an RSS aggregator (IE7 required). The team recently did a Channel 9 video showing most of the main features, and if you are interested in trying it for yourself, you can sign up to test it at ideas.live.com.

This is an early beta product, so if you are not completely comfortable testing pre-release software you may like to wait for a later build.