How the new Entourage kicks Mail’s butt
A while ago I posted about a number of people who have enjoyed the switch from Mail.app to the new Spotlight-enabled and Sync-capable Entourage.
Sven Semmler was delighted 
with the switch a week ago. He still is; Redmond is still making his day.
In his most recent post he describes how he can still do everything in Entourage that he once did with Mail. He also records some fixes for the problems of double Spotlight results and handling iCal invitations and reminders which users of the new Entourage experience. They would be worth recording, if this site was interested in Entourage.
James Caudill also finds Entourage far superior to Mail.app. He outlines a number of problems that made Mail unusable for him and make Entourage his email client of choice:
Don’t get me wrong. If someone said, “Hey they fixed a lot of stuff in Mail.App and it is stable now.†I will be the first one to try using it again. I love the simple layout and the pretty icons and stuff, but I really need dependability first.
Del.icio.us user mjg is heading back to Entourage too. He says, “Apple Mail just isn’t cutting it, especially with its lack of support for secondary-CA signed certificates.”
Related posts
March 30th, 2006 at 1:29 am
The whole single large DataBase that contains all of your data is still troubling to me. Email, Calendar, Contacts and more… If it gets currupt (and I’ve had that happened to several clients) your loose it ALL. And aside from trying to rebuild the DB (and perhaps EntouAid), there are not many options for recovering the data.
Also, that single large file is very unfriendly when it comes to making backups. If you have a DB that is multiple GB and you receive a single 4K email, guess what, you’ve got to back up the whole multi GB file again. This makes backups in general a real pain with Entourage, especially if you want to do incremental backups.
March 30th, 2006 at 5:55 am
I have to add another voice to the “one huge database is bad” topic. I’ve yet to meet an Entourage user who hasn’t had corruption problems. When one has to rebuild a database every week just to keep a simple thing like an email client running, it’s time to find a better application.
March 30th, 2006 at 7:34 am
Can ClamAV scan the Entourage database for email viruses?
March 30th, 2006 at 7:36 am
Well, I used to worry about this 2004 monolithic db. Until I started losing data and finding corrupt mbox problems in Mail.app. I have used both extensively over the past 2 years. E2004 has proven to be the more stable of the two. Have lost far more mail in Mail.app. Have not had any problems at all with E2004. No crashes, no corrupt database, nothing, just plain sailing. The Mac BU have made a major effort with stability. And if you’re worried, just do a daily backup of the MUD folder.
March 30th, 2006 at 8:06 am
After Microsofts “lets not tell there is a problem until we have fixed it” last year I have reached a point where I simply want everything with the brand Microsoft off my machine. IE is gone, WMP is gone, PP is gone, Entourage is gone, Messenger is gone. All I need is a good substitute for Word and Excel. Personally I can live without word but communicating with others can be a pain if it is not installed.
Entourage is not an option due to the vulnerability of it’s single file message database. The problems this setup has brought my clients are pretty absurd and something nobody should have to experience, yet they are still happening after each upgrade received.
Hans
March 30th, 2006 at 11:23 am
I liked Entourage, but there were two major problems: with a multi-gig mail database, everything slowed to a crawl, and secondly, no Spotlight support really sucked, because Entourage’s own full-text search was so extremely slow.
Now, they’ve fixed the Spotlight problem, but can someone tell me if they’ve fixed the performance problems with large mail databases?
March 30th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
I’ve yet to have any of the problems with Mail.app that people have discussed. It’s been one nice smooth ride for me… and my mailbox(es) currently hold a total of 4,500 messages with a good 2,000+ messages held in local folders. A good half of my messages contain attachments making my mail DB nearly 2GB.
March 30th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
I’ve yet to have any of the problems with Mail.app that people have discussed. It’s been one nice smooth ride for me… and my mailbox(es) currently hold a total of 4,500 messages with a good 2,000+ messages held in local folders. A good half of my messages contain attachments making my mail DB nearly 2GB.w
March 30th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
I have been using Entourage for about three years now, and will not go back to Mail. The Microsoft Business Unit has done a great job with the latest update for Spotlight and syncing with iCal. I never use iCal, but it’s nice to be able to upload my information to my .Mac account.
March 30th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
I have a feeling the Microsoft buisness unit has kept selling us a great looking application suite that contains a lot of legacy code they are now scrambling to renew and fix as problems keep popping up.
My mail folder contains 4 Gb of mail’s. If I were to loose this due to the one file database structure of Entourage I would be dead in the water.
Ok I could back up my database each night. But who needs the hassle.
I have seen this happen to clients a few times during the past years and usually with devastating consequences.
So in my mind Entourage is simply to dangerous to use
Also one more thing I have not seen here. All messages are sent as unicode without the option to switch to ISO. This means that in all countries except for those that use english there is a serious problem communicating with older computers using mailclients that don’t support Unicode. Both Mac’s and Windows machines.
Hans
April 1st, 2006 at 3:44 am
I’m actually going to make the switch from Entourage - which I’ve been using since it first came out on the Classic Mac OS - to Apple Mail. The main reason: its performance with large databases is abysmal on my Intel Core mini. Launch time is slow, mail checking and filtering is poky, and the HTML rendering engine (still based on IE 5.2.3) is anything but fleet.
Granted, my mail database is huge, and does corrupt every so often (though I’ve been able to avoid it, of late, with monthly rebuilds, regardless of performance). But it’s finally showing too much rust, and Apple Mail is looking like a better option for my needs. I already use SpamSieve, and I can port my E’rage address book to Apple’s without any difficulty. So the move will happen.
Given that Office 2004 is still carting around a lot of Carbon code, I can only imagine the workload being handled by the folks at MS Bay: complete recompile of Office in XCode, using the Intel codeset. My guess is that Office 2007 will be an Intel-only install, too - there’s no real need to introduce a Universal binary if the release happens after the whole Mac line has been moved to Intel chips.
April 5th, 2006 at 2:14 am
[...] As I try to get a handle on the information overload of today’s work environment, these sort of hassles become more and more evident. And while I think Entourage is a nice product, I may have to reverse a trend and move to Thunderbird or Mail.app. [...]
April 20th, 2006 at 1:00 am
All I need is a good substitute for Word and Excel. Personally I can live without word but communicating with others can be a pain if it is not installed. Have you thought about OpenOffice for X11? It seems to work just fine on the Mac from what I can tell.
Count me back into the switched back to Entourage group. I thougth about it a while, and I gave Mail.app a year long try, but in the end, I found Entourage to be a much more cohesive application overall.
Not just Spotlight supported, now, btw, but also synching with Address Book and iCal.
The ability to have profiles (Entourage calls them “identities”) is a huge plus for Entourage as well. You can even disabled Entoruage searching per identity, which is very handy.
Anyway, I wrote up a big long series of posts on my LiveJournal about switching back last week. http://smallerdemon.livejournal.com if you want to read them.
April 20th, 2006 at 1:01 am
Redmond is still making his day. ;) I think the Mac BU is actaully based in the Bay Area, isn’t it?
April 20th, 2006 at 3:24 am
Just wondering.
Why do you need multiple identities?
April 20th, 2006 at 9:31 am
I don’t want my work Exchange account in the same email space as my various personal email accounts. I like it to be completely separate. For a lot of reasons, but now the big reason is that I don’t want my work emails indexed in Spotlight but I do want access to my work emails on my Mac at home, while at the same time having my non-work emails indexed in Spotlight. Having mulitple identities accomplishes this in the easiest way possible. Personal identity is indexed, work identity is not. Voila.
My spouse also has a big collection of old email she likes to have access to, and it’s all in an Entourage archive. It’s a lot easier just to have it set up as an identity than to have her have to log in and have a separate account on the machine.
April 20th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Ok.
Your first point is well taken allthough I solved this by creating a login for each family member since I’m scared silly of Entourage after using it since version 2001 at different clients installation. After removing it from all my clients installations loosing mail has not happened. Also I can not afford another family member to have an accident on my part of the machine.
And to be honest the multiple identity “thing” can be quite dangerous to say the least. I have had clients create a new identity and suddenly all their mail was gone…
I’m by now up to 7.5 GB of stored mail. Using Entourage has up to now spelled disaster with this amount of email. They’ve had the best part of 20 years to get out a decent installation of Office and IMHO they simply blew it. Unfortunately the problems with Office in the last 12 months do not indicate that they have arrived at a point where they have a stable distribution that does not need a patch each time we get a new version of the system.
Since June last year Office has cost me thousands of dollars in lost revenues. And I guess each person has a breaking point and I guess I just reached mine. As I have said before I suspect that Office does contain quite a bit of legacy code which is causing problems. I will take another look at office when we are about six months into Office 2007 but until then I would be greatfull if someone could provide me with Word and Excel functionality without a label that says Microsoft.
I used Eudora in the past but do to some problems at a certain point in time it became very hard to use so Apple mail became kind of last resourt and sofar it has not lost one email for me or my clients.
So for me it’s security over functionality.
Kind regards
Hans
April 20th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
“Have you thought about OpenOffice for X11? It seems to work just fine on the Mac from what I can tell.”
Sorry I missed this part.
Although it is easy to do without all the features of Word and Entourage, Excel, unfortunately, is a whole different ballpart. You can’t tell someone that is used to using Excel to switch to anything lesser. So Open Office is not quite cutting it in that regard.
But there is one problem though with Excel, and that is it seems the Windows and Mac versions are different enough to cause users switching back and forth some grief.
The simplest solution would probably be if Microsoft could get it’s act together and finally come out with a version of Office that simply works. The pricing is steep enough for users to really deserve a working version. And no more hush hush monkey business when faults are discovered. Microsofts handling of last year problems was absurd and degrading to say the least.
Hans
April 21st, 2006 at 11:52 am
Hans - Definitely stick with what works for you. The nice thing about Hawk WIngs is that he posts a LOT of other mail client information. Another great resource for scouting out email client is http://emailman.com/ He’s been around for years, and always has a lot of info. I am all for people sticking with what works for them.
Sorry to hear you’ve had such terrible issues with Entourage. The current incarnation of Entourage is actually built on the foundations of the old Claris Email Macintosh application from what I understand.
In that I don’t rely on Office that much, I can not claim the level of unhappiness with it that you have experienced. My wife certainly is more disgrunted about it after spending six years using it for scientific papers and her PhD thesis.
Overall I’ve found the Office suite for Mac to be a pretty decent application, but there are not a lot of alternatives. Having lived through Office 6 for Macintosh, the current version seems downright amazing by comparison (6 preceded Office 98 for PC and wow, what a stinker), but nearly anything would have.
I’m not necessarily trying to defend MS here, but in the long run I can’t really claim great happiness and satisfaction with -any- application I have used. They all have major issues simply due to the fact that, well, it’s software. It’s gonna crash. I spent a lot of unhappy time in the past thinking “What the HELL is wrong with these people? Why can’t this just WORK?” and now I spend more time thinking “Eh, it’s software. I’ll find one that crashes the least.” It’s definitely the case that the more simple the tasks, the less likely you’ll experience complications. Most of my major issues have always been with applications that were performing some very intensive and/or complicated tasks.
And now I do help desk for a living and I hear a lot of complaints about software. About Office for Windows. About nearly everything that anyone works with. I can’t think of ANYTHING that our clients used that I have’n't heard “[INSET NAME HERE] just sucks. Everytime I try to [PERFORM A TASK] it does something stupid or crashes.” And it’s a daily happening. Thing is… it’s a hits and misses issue. We always remember when it crashes more than the majority of time it runs. When it crashes, and it’s critical, double the chances we’ll remember. It’s really this sort of thing that has me looking for something else besides tech support to do. Things happen. I’m happy to spend time and effort researching the resolution to a problem, but in most cases, the person asking me to resolve it only wants an immediate solution because what they are doing is critical NOW and they wouldn’t be calling me if they didn’t want the issue resolved immediately, even when for me it’s going to often be a longer term solution where I have to be studious and patient and methodical in searching for a solution, determining if that is the problem. etc. Ad inifinitum.
I am certainly not trying to downplay your Office woes, because I know with a great deal of my own personal experience at work on both Windows and Macintosh, there are a LOT of Office woes out there. I think I’m just saying, well, you’ll probalby find something you like more, sure, but whatever you use will have some problems along the way no matter what. And you’re right to have a breaking point that leads you to looking for another solution.
I know that I’ve personally lost countless hours of my life to the various iLife releases completely fucking up my 17,000 photo collection and me having to rebuild it, But they are still the best apps for out there that I like to use.
Good luck with your search! I would also love to know if you come across a suitable alternative for Office.
April 21st, 2006 at 2:06 pm
*heh* This came up on Slashdot today!
http://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2006/04/tour-of-microsofts-mac-lab.html
Very cool tour of Microsoft’s Mac lab in Redmond.
150 Mac minis!
June 28th, 2007 at 9:09 am
I switched to mail.app about three years ago. No more corrupt database, quick incremental backups, great with spotlight, even better with applescript, love the smartfolders. Simply no comparison for me.
I was a diehard entourage user.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:32 am
[...] it has its fans, the shortcomings of Entourage 2004 were well-known and many were hoping for greater things from [...]