More butt-kicking: Entourage over Mail.app
A number of people now believe that the new Entourage is significantly better than Mail.app.
Smallerdemon adds himself to that list, writing a five part series comparing his experiences of using Mail.app to life with Entourage.
The verdict: “Mail.app was given a good, fair shake I think, but Entourage’s interface and features drew me back.”
Part one 
addresses the new features in Entourage 2004 11.2.3 like Spotlight and sync support.
Parts two and three consider how the interface of Entourage is nicer than Mail’s.
In parts four and five he talks about how the Project Center is one of the key things that drew him back to Entourage.
Related posts
April 22nd, 2006 at 1:50 am
I was forced to use Entourage instead of Mail (due to the use of Exchange calendars
at work), starting about three months ago.
There are good and bad points. Some things are really irritating in Entourage,
for example junk mail protection worked much better for me in Mail. And
many small details are sort of wrong in Entourage - Mail is much more intuitive,
at least for me. I got used to editing newspaper articles and columns in
Mail, and the word processing features in Entourage are not so good.
Often I’m forced to use Word for text editing instead of Entourage.
And there are irritating little things, such as badly behaving Scandinavian
letters on the subject line.
On the other hand, Entourage has many features Mail lacks, and some Mail
shortcomings are also irritating (such as broken web links in mail messages).
I would like to switch back to Mail, but the necessity of using Exchange keeps me
with Entourage.
April 22nd, 2006 at 2:29 am
Still can’t deny that the design (by design I mean look and feel) of the application and the user interface is trash compared to many applications. Anything that drops gradients to fill spatial relationships in there with no thought to the overall design at hand does not get to to sit in my dock.
It is a good business collaboration tool whose vcard and icalendar support sync with mac services and not with its outlook pc counterpart (that’s a weakness of outlook). Its exchange services are quality, but that means I have to run Kerio (which is a good mac mail service) or MS Server vs a Linux Server — the minority system in the world by far nowadays, and for good reason for those of us who develop online and deal with large infrastructure.
The problem here again is that MS puts out good but not great things. They’ve lost the server battle, they keep the collaboration business model because there’s no competition. It’s ripe for someone to tear down — maybe I should change industries:)?
April 22nd, 2006 at 2:50 am
Its IMAP support is severely lacking. I was surprised to find no way to turn off certificate validation and some ambiguous messages warning me that my connection would not be secure. I didn’t know if that meant it was going to just accept the non-validated cert or if it was going to default to plaintext!
However, I’m pretty sure Entourage does not strive to be a good IMAP client. They want everybody’s mouths to water at the thought of an Exchange server, so they’re going to provide just passable IMAP support and that’s it. (personally, I think this is why Apple has such shotty IMAP support too — they want everyone to long for a .Mac account (which I think is a little pricey for the very little you get)) So I agree that there’s something involving the Exchange server market here.
Then, even though I turned off the spam folder, it still moved old read messages in my Inbox to the spam folder. I was upset about this because I sort by order received and not date (because I don’t trust the date field), so when I moved those old messages back, they showed up at the bottom of the list. How frustrating. So I agree, the spam filter is subpar. Simple Bayesian-like classification/training (as seen in Thunderbird and Apple Mail) is the new way to go for client-side filtering.
I do agree that there are some nice productivity applications built in. However, it’s too bad that you have to put all of your eggs in one basket. It’s too bad you have to switch to Entourage in order to get a Project Manager.
So I really think there’s a market out there for shared addressbook/calendar/project API that is able to do fun things like store all of this information on a mail server. I like to use Thunderbird for my e-mail, but I want to use the OS X Address Book for my address book, and I’d like to manage my projects in some other way completely… PLUS, I’d like all of this to be portable to the PC I have at the office. There’s no real way to do that right now.
My HOPE is that the Web2.0 craze will make more people want to put things on-line (as long as it’s all not centralized at Google!) and so real attention will be paid by developers on further on-line integration built into simple tools (some of these tools already exist, even as Thunderbird extensions, but many of them are only available for PC… though I argue that there is more demand in the OS X community for these apps than in the PC market!). Then I could mix and match. Wouldn’t that be nice?
April 22nd, 2006 at 2:52 am
Oh, and as far as I can tell, neither Apple Mail nor Entourage have the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed.
In Thunderbird new posts to my most read blogs come in just like they’re new mail. It’s nice.
(so maybe I just want Thunderbird to grow up and look more like Apple Mail… and put everything inside Thunderbird…)
April 22nd, 2006 at 3:03 am
I’ll second thunderbird growing up a bit more — had it more advanced OS X features, I think I’d jump ship in a heartbeat. If desktop application coding was my thing, I’d support them in that realm in a heartbeat.
It’s interesting you noted the IMAP support, I noticed it was deathly when I used Entourage for that — it’s a shame too, IMAP is such a blessing… never looked back after POP.
April 22nd, 2006 at 7:17 am
Ted, .Mac is an IMAP service so your comments on Mail and .Mac are somewhat bizarre.
Personally, I find Entourage’s interface to be utterly abysmal but, then again, it’s partially based on Outlook so there is no surprise in that fact.
April 23rd, 2006 at 12:37 am
In Apple Mail, from what I remember, you have the choice of “.Mac, IMAP, and POP’ for server types. Is the “.Mac” there just for easier configuration?
It was my impression that .Mac made IMAP available, but Apple Mail was able to take advantage to other proprietary features not available to the typical IMAP account.
April 23rd, 2006 at 6:29 am
It’s just there to make configuration automatic/easier when you have a .Mac account (or more than one .Mac account). There are no proprietary features - its just a standard IMAP account. You can use whatever e-mail client you like for .Mac or you can use Mail - it’s up to you.
April 23rd, 2006 at 11:40 am
Mail and the new Entourage both work well for most clients. Claiming one is superior over the other is a great over simplification.
If you have a large mailbox and are running on a new Intel Mac you may need to move to Mail out of necessity.
Rosetta is nice but does not offer enough power to handle large mailboxes in my expereinces this week (I admin many new Macs of all sorts for power users in design industry)
On a new MacBookPro (1GB RAM), and an optimized system, a large mailbox (6.5 GB with tons of attachments) makes working impossible in Entourage. The client needs to keep all the attachments (I don’t reccomend keeping them) and Entourage was totally impossible. All databases were rebuilt, and other optimizing was done…all to no avail. Entourage crawled. This is not slam on Entourage..it just isn’t running natively on Intel.
A lengthy import to Mail and all was well. The client certainly missed some of his favorite Entourage features but he was able to fly in Mail with no problems. I now have MBP config’d running Entourage with no mail services, just using the scheduling, notices etc..which runs just fine…low overhead. BTW, don’t forget about Sync Services and being able to bring your data in/out of all apps and devices now.
As always YMMV and you have to think about your priorities and trade-offs until we get Univeral Binaries.
Col. Panic
April 23rd, 2006 at 10:59 pm
I hadn’t heard feedback like that about Entourage under Rosetta before. Thanks for posting it.
What features from Entourage did the client miss in Mail?
April 24th, 2006 at 1:29 am
I’ve gone back and forth on using Mail and Entourage; I like them both, for different reasons. Entourage has more useful features; Mail has a better interface and doesn’t keep everything in a single database. But when I switched to an Intel-based Mac, I did notice that Entourage was decidedly slower than Mail, at least with my installation, so I’m back with Mail.
April 24th, 2006 at 2:11 am
Tim, the client missed the way Entourage was able to display his list of messages by date headingw, and also having the notices, alerts, scheduling calendar, address book all integrated together and lastly he was familiar with it and had years of experience using it.
Apple’s Address Book, iCal and Mail all run natively on Intel. As soon as MS comes out with Universal Binary for Intel I’m sure he will want to move back to Entourage.
Please keep in mind that Entourage with a much smaller mail box and fewer attachements will run OK on Intel Macs, but it sure isn’t the snappy performance that you would get out of Mail.app.
Col. Panic
April 25th, 2006 at 12:43 am
Of course, I was secretly hoping that I would be able to point the client and this or that plugin that would solve his problem :)
But I see not. Do you or the client have any indication of a timeline for that Microsoft Office for Mac universal binary? I have been unable to find one.
April 25th, 2006 at 1:00 am
I can’t remember hearing but you can contact the MBU (Macintosh Business Unit) of Microsoft for the official word and post here. ;-)
April 25th, 2006 at 4:02 am
From Apple’s site: http://www.apple.com/universal/applications/
“Our teams have been hard at work on the Intel transition since WWDC in June 2005 and we’ll ship the next version of Office for Mac as a Universal application.â€
- Roz Ho, General Manager, Mac Business Unit, Microsoft
—
Thanks for the posting Tim. My move back was definitely due to a lot of personal preferences. I don’t think I hit on a lot of things about the intergrated nature of Entourage that I like that I know a lot of people specficially find as the very thing they -don’t- like about Entourage. It’s definitely understandable. But I like the across the board consistent interface that I find much more usable than the Mail.app one and having to use a series of other applications to collate everything into one cohesive idea.
I would like to emphasize that when I say I like it, well, that means I like it, and I honeslty don’t expect anyone else to like it. Interface subjectivity is as complicated as religious belief, so arguing about it is nearly as useful too. :)