Mozilla Thunderbird had been my email client of choice for the past three years. It has a great spam filter, native support for Gmail, and came with a great newsgroup reader. It was missing two things that I needed from an email client – the ability to connect to webmail accounts such as Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and the ability to connect to online calendars. I was able to solve the former with the Webmail extension that worked fairly well for the most part, but occasionally, suffered from timeouts and errors whenever the webmail provider changes its protocol slightly. The latter, however, was an unsolved mystery as I had no way of connecting Thunderbird with Google Calendar – my online calendar of choice.

When the new Windows Live Mail Beta came out, one of the most touted features was the integration with Windows Live Calendar Beta. The incorporation of this put Windows Live Mail a step above Thunderbird, which was beginning to show signs of its age, especially in comparison to the new Mozilla Firefox 3. Windows Live Mail has a great new look, full support for Hotmail accounts, works with POP and IMAP accounts (works great with Gmail) and its integration with Windows Live Calendar is even better than with Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft should be worried that if they make Windows Live Mail too perfect, people will stop buying Outlook (although that may be unlikely as Windows Live Mail will probably never support Microsoft Exchange!)

I did a parallel run with both Mozilla Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail Beta for the past two weeks and I’m happy to say that I can now use Windows Live Mail Beta as my primary email client. I have also migrated my calendar from Google Calendar to Windows Live Calendar Beta. I will not give up on Thunderbird just yet, as I know that Mozilla will be releasing Thunderbird 3 sometime in 2009. For now though, Windows Live Mail will be set as my default email client.

Before we get into that question, here are two things that you may not know about Windows Live ID:

1. You do not need to use a @live.com, @msn.com or @hotmail.com email address to get a Windows Live ID. In fact, you can use any email address you want and make that into a Windows Live ID! Say if you have an alumni email address (i.e. me@alumni.uni.edu) from your university, you can use that as your Windows Live ID. What's good about having a Windows Live ID? Read the next point.
   
2. Your Windows Live ID enables you to use one account for login authentication with all Microsoft web sites - but it's more than that. If a non-Microsoft web site supports Windows Live ID authentication, you can use your Windows Live ID to register for an account on that web site. Of course, the web site will still know nothing about you except that you have a Windows Live ID, so it will ask you to fill in information that they want to have about you. What's the benefit of using your Windows Live ID in this case then? Well, whenever you need to login to that web site again, all you need to remember is your Windows Live ID and its password!

Of course, the ultimate goal would be to have every web site in the world to support Windows Live ID authentication, so that you can access all of them with just one Windows Live ID account. Unfortunately, we are very far away from that goal. So, getting back to the original question of which non-Microsoft web sites are using Windows Live ID authentication? Finding them will be our challenge. Let's start by building up a list of web sites that supports Windows Live ID. I'll start off with two below. You can add to this list by responding in the comments section. Happy hunting!

Web sites that support Windows Live ID authentication:

Match.com

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