Six Ways Mail beats the pants off Entourage
John’s work moved to Microsoft Exchange Server so that workers could share calendars more easily.
John likes the challenge of a new piece of software, so he offered (after five happy Apple Mail years) to be the guinea pig for a test run of Entourage.
His account of how the switch went 
and the pros and cons makes for interesting reading.
In particular, a week with Entourage gave him enough experience to outline six (or possibly, five) ways in which Mail.app is better than Entourage. Not least, Mail.app seems a lot more ‘thought out’.
And how does he feel after the trial run?
Tags: Apple Mail, email, Email in general, entourage, mail.app, microsoft, switchingSometimes, you get a piece of software installed and, no matter how excited you get (see above for my software-trying-out love declaration) the thing is just damned hard work…. Entourage is one of those hard-work apps. I am going to stick with it though––it’s only been a week and I’m sure I’ll get used to it. But part of me feels that I shouldn’t have to––Entourage, if it were any good, would have banished any thoughts I’d have of going back to Mail within hours of using it. You know when you find an app that just works––unfortunately, Entourage ain’t one of those.
Related posts
September 5th, 2006 at 1:02 am
The linked article is mostly fluff. I don’t care much about exact font sizes in HTML mail - I don’t think people should be clogging up the Net with HTML mail anyway. But I’m sure I could find a way around that if I (a) had the program and (b) cared to look for one.
And “I can’t put my sig at the top”. Give me strength: it doesn’t belong there, and it’s a surprise to find a Microsoft (of all people) mail app has finally realized that. (See Dan’s Mail Format site on top-posting). OK, it’s nice to be able to modify such things, but it’s no big deal. And I shan’t even bother with “the mail app doesn’t second-guess me on replies” and “I hate the dock icon”.
There’s nothing here that a serious email user might need to know. Nothing about the mail-storage method. Entourage stores mail in a proprietary (and easily corrupted) database: it’s important for people to know that. Nothing about whether you can subscribe to mailboxes when using IMAP. (You can’t in Mail: you get the lot.) Nothing about whether you can set custom headers. Nothing to say whether the mail clients in question can be set to view in plain text. (In Mail use the defaults switch: defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool YES.) There’s also nothing about whether either client has PGP/GPG support. (For Mail use Sente’s plugin.)
It’s chit-chat. Pure fluff.
September 5th, 2006 at 2:21 am
Umm…sorry; but the linked article is a joke. The truth is when you compare real features, reliability, and stability, Entourage trounces Mail.
1. Mail automatically closes the original message when you reply
That’s nice… unless you want to file said message into another folder, which is easiest if the message is open (click the Move icon at the top), or unless you want to clear the message’s flag (click the Flag icon at the top), or unless …etc.
2. Entourage won’t let you specify 11 pt. font sizes
Pffft… If I could vote on a law to make Plain Text email messages a requirement, I’d vote in a heart beat!
So good - maybe that will discourage more people from sending huge, bloated, hard-for-others-to-read messages through the net, bogging down the already-laden-from-spam servers! Take a plain text message and compare the size with a HTML message sometime. Now multiply that times a few million a day. And what ever happened to email etiquette?
Personally, if someone tried to make me read all of his messages in 11pt. Arial, I would simply stop reading his messages.
3. Entourage won’t place your signature before quoted text
This is a joke, right? “Waaaaaa i can’t force everyone to read my silly quote of the day signature! WAAAAAAA!”
No thanks - leave it as a foot note please. I’d rather get to reading the *actual* message - the reason you sent the email in the first place. Or do you send out messages simply to show people all of your pretty signatures?
4. Entourage has sounds from Outlook Express
Sure, if you select them instead of the default new sounds. And this matters how?
5. Entourage’s dock icon is ugly.
…I’d argue so is Mail’s. And this adds what to the article?
6. Adding multiple recipients in Entourage is hard
(if you don’t know how to arrow-key through menus)
Ahhh… the only truly meaningful point the author of the article made. Yet had he bothered to use the arrow keys rather than the mouse, he’d have found that you can quickly add multiple recipients with the keyboard, just as you can in Mail:
a. type part of a name - a list pops up
b. arrow-key to the correct address for that name
c. hit TAB
repeat for each recipient
if no more recipients, hit TAB again to get to the message body, then start typing
Quite fast and intuitive, so that nullifies the *one* truly meaningful point of the article.
As Mike said, the rest of the article is “chit-chat. Pure fluff”.
September 5th, 2006 at 5:46 am
sorry, but that article is indeed a joke.
i’d like to see some statistics as to how many mac users use mail vs. entourage. i’ve been using entourage since it was outlook express. i’ve tried mail, but it’s just not much use.
first of all, i tried importing my entourage messages. mail claimed it could do this. a couple of hours later it was done! there were all my folders… without a single email in them. :(
thanks for pointing that out about the dock icon. mail’s is SO ugly. a postage stamp? ugh… i’ll take the purple e any day. at least it makes an effort to get along with the other dock icons.
weird that the article dude didn’t mention the virtues of having an integrated calendar, or memo and to-do integration and palm sync.
honestly, i’d like to move to mail since i have an intel mac, but fluffy articles like this one aren’t going to do it.
September 5th, 2006 at 11:32 am
Different people have different needs, and email clients can respond quite variously to different situations. I ditched Entourage for four reasons. First, no amount of tinkering could get it to access my employer’s LDAP server, while Mail works perfectly, thus giving me access to several thousand email addresses without having to add any to my address book. Second, you can select and view multiple mailboxes with Mail — something I do a lot — while Entourage only lets you view the contents of one at a time. Third, in contrast to the experience of some others, Mail works much better with my IMAP server than Entourage: Entourage is always indicating new messages when there aren’t any new messages. And fourth, using Mail (along with several other apps that use the System dictionary) allows me to maintain one custom dictionary for almost all my work.
Mail also imported my Entourage messages — thousands of them — flawlessly.
I miss just one thing about Entourage: I can set it so that it doesn’t show the “On Sep 4, 2006, at 11:42 AM, X wrote” preface to a reply. But with Mail it has to be deleted manually. Very annoying. In general Entourage allows more customizing of reply options.
September 5th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Major Entourage weakness: Searching.
Why can’t Entourage find messages when only part of the sender’s email is entered???
September 5th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
I’d like to point out that the article lead-in was “my experiences thus far after week 1″, so sorry if I didn’t get down to the nitty gritty of PGP/GPG support etc., but I was focusing on the initial user experience from the point of view of a switcher.
As is clear from these comments, different people want different things from their email client. How you interact with it is down to a mixture of experience and intuition, and when you switch an app like this your point of reference is the application you’re switching from.
September 5th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Nicely put, John.
September 6th, 2006 at 8:22 am
“Second, you can select and view multiple mailboxes with Mail — something I do a lot — while Entourage only lets you view the contents of one at a time.”
Actually, Entourage will let you double-click any folder to open it in a new window. You can have as many open at once as you want. Check your preferences: Entourage > Preferences > General > Double-clicking in the olders list opens a new window.
“Third, in contrast to the experience of some others, Mail works much better with my IMAP server than Entourage: Entourage is always indicating new messages when there aren’t any new messages.”
I’ve used multiple versions of Mail with my IMAP server, and it’s an all-out calamity at best. More often than not, Mail doesn’t let you subscribe to individual folders on IMAP servers, and when there’s a problem, fails silently, giving you little or no information about what actually caused the problem. And the other half of the time, Mail simply crashes when an IMAP server does something Mail doesn’t expect. At least with Entourage, if a problem happens, you are made well aware of why it happened, and you at least have a clue as to how to solve it. And I haven’t had Entourage crash on me in a long, long time. Mail crashes very frequently.
“Major Entourage weakness: Searching. Why can’t Entourage find messages when only part of the sender’s email is entered???”
What type of search you are performing? Entourage has (1) a simple search dialog box, (2) an advanced search dialog box, (3) a list filter mechanism at the top of the main window, and (4) full Spotlight search support.
Recent Entourage releases have full Spotlight integration; so searching is truly a breeze.
Simple search dialog box - since that dialog box doesn’t offer a way for you to set “Starts with”, “Contains”, “Ends with”, etc., it’s probably going to make certain assumptions about how you want to search for the text you enter - my bet is those assumptions don’t include “Sender’s email address contains”.
Advanced search dialog box (aka. More Options from the simple search dialog box) - I can vouch that Entourage can indeed find “Sender’s email address contains”. If this is what you tried, you had to have done something wrong. It works fine.
List Filtering in the main window - Filtering is a quick , easy way to perform the most common search patterns, which may or may not include “Sender’s email address contains”.
September 6th, 2006 at 10:27 am
Actually, Entourage will let you double-click any folder to open it in a new window. You can have as many open at once as you want. Sure, if I want a lot of windows open — but Mail allows me to view multiple mailboxes in the same pane, and therefore to organize and view them in different ways.
Entourage has been more stable than Mail for you; I’ve had the opposite experience (almost no crashes with Mail — actually, I can’t remember any — occasional ones with Entourage). You’ve found Mail’s IMAP support to stink, I have more trouble with Entourage. Some of these differences, I suspect, are related to varying behavior in IMAP servers, some of which work better with some clients, others with other clients. But in any case, it sure sounds like you’re better off with Entourage and I’m better off with Mail.
September 6th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
While I agree that the article is pure fluff, and Entourage offers some good email capabilities (and calendaring) I can’t escape the conclusion that Entourage performance is shite!
I moved to Entourage 6 months ago when our organisation finally upgrade the Exchange servers so that I could use (was forced to change) Entourage in place of the classic Outlook for Mac app. Before moving to Entourage I was using Mail to manage all of my mail and outlook classic only to schedule meetings etc. If Apple would do the right thing and just add true Exchange integration to Mail then I would not have to do this). Fingers crossed for the final Leopard release!
What I have found in this six months is that Entourage is a performance DOG. Forget so-called functionality etc. Entourage is pure-and-simple a poor performance performer when used as an Exchange client. Let me give a few examples:
General Performance
At this moment Entourage is sitting in the background doing exactly squat, apart for checking for email and looking at when I might have another appointment. Yet, as I type this it is chewing between 2-5% of my processor. And, if I leave it open for several days, as I am want to do, this will grow until it is consuming ~10% of my processor while doing basically nothing.
Viewing someone else’s calendar etc.
When I try to view someone else’s calendar, it literally takes Entourage 5-10 minutes to fully populate it, all the while chewing badly on the CPU. In Windows, or even the Web client, this is also instantaneous. For god’s sake, how much information, and how hard is this to do really? Why is the Windows version and web client sooooo much faster?
And god-forbid I should look at someone else’s calendar, because then Entourage will automatically keep it in its sidebar, which would be OK except it then also adds that to the periodicallY “Updating …” routine. At one stage I had 10 other users folders in my sidebar and nearly went mad with the performance lags! Now, I delete them after I use them so that I don’t take this hit. Unfortunately, the next time I want to use them I have to wait 5-10 minutes for them to populate!
Adding a calendar event
I have become scared of even sending new events with Entourage! When I add events in Entourage, it then starts a cycle of “Now updating…” that effectively locks Entourage up (sometimes the pizza wheel shows, other times it just stops responding on screen) for anywhere from 5 seconds to 20 seconds. When it does come back, sometimes I will get the text I was writing catch up with me, sometimes not! Again, how much work can this really be, and what is the threading and blocking model MS is using on this?
I won’t even go into the things that Entourage leaves out compared to the Windows version (for what reason other than to piss Mac users off?) here, or the way in which it periodically corrupts the brain-dead single-file database structure it uses.
Entourage could be a good, even great application. Unfortunately, MS seems to have once again crippled it just enough to make it look like the Mac is slower than the Windows equivalent, rather than let the chips fall where they may. I can only hope that either Apple makes Leopard Mail what it should be (with the calendaring and task hooks for Exchange etc.) or that MS finally makes Entourage perform how it should!
At this moment, I am looking like going back to MAil sooner rather than later. I will give Entourage another month. After that, I will use a Citrix server link to Outlook to do Calendaring and go back to Mail for email.
September 6th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
[...] Jesse Holliday saw a recent post on Hawk Wings on how Mail.app bests Entourage and emailed me a thoughtful account of his own experiences. It’s good enough to share. [...]
September 7th, 2006 at 1:13 am
I used Entourage since 2000 but switched to Mail in 2005. It was a very sweet change. Not least because I feel safer that my data isn’t locked into its own database.
I gather MS is unbundling its Calendar and Addressbooks in future versions.
I would never go back to Mail and now with Pages 06 and Keynote I just need that spreadsheet to be rid of the bloated, insecure mess that is MS Office.
Life is looking much sweeter.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Entourage’s dock icon is ugly?!? Are you running Entourage on a PC? SO CHANGE IT IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT. Jeez.