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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Why can’t Entourage find messages when only part of the sender’s email is entered???

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.