Hi, Ivan.

As the others said, you were not "forced" to use WLM.

To make the Unread messages more recognizable in the Message List, create a
News Rule:
Tools | Message Rules | News | New:
For all messages
Highlight it with Default

That's what I use, but others here prefer to highlight it with Black - or
Green or whatever looks best to you.

I suspect that very few of us use WLM as it arrives "out of the box". But,
just like OE (and Windows Mail in Vista) before it, WLM is highly
customizable. The WLM Team (the same one that gave us the pale pastel color
scheme) also hid the Menu Bar by default. To see it momentarily, just press
Alt; to toggle it on/off, press Alt+M, M.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64

"Ivan" wrote in message
news
Since using windows 7 I have been forced to download and use Windows Live
Mail as an alternative to Outlook Express, after a lot of tinkering around
I've managed to get it somewhere near as usable as my original Mail/News
client.. however when using 'News' the headers are now no longer in bold
type to let me know that there are 'new unread' messages still in the
unexpanded thread, also annoyingly the name of the author of the original
topic or replies no longer appear in the 'from' column, and try as I might
I can't find a way of activating this feature.. if these two problems are
solvable I would be more than appreciative TIA Ivan.