Windows Vista ships with an upgraded mail program called Windows Mail, the successor to Outlook Express. The program is sleek and slightly updated with a fast search feature. It's nice that the same shortcut, Ctrl-E, takes you to the search field in the Vista shell, Mail, Internet Explorer, Maxthon and Firefox.

But Windows Mail's new junk mail catcher is a great lesson in how not to design a mail filter.

• It runs before your own mail rules run, so forget about deleting persistent spam from the server -- the junk mail folder makes sure you'll see it now and forever
• It's case-sensitive, so you have to type in not just 'Viagra' but also 'viagra' and 'VIAGRA' for it to work
• There's no way for search terms to work across all fields, so you have to separately type in 'Viagra' for subject, from and body
• It doesn't support regular expressions, and there's no easy hook for an external mail filter, so you can't use more powerful filters to augment its own

The first issue is the key one, and I've had to turn off the built-in filter so my own rules get first look at the mail queue.