How plugins turned an Entourage Girl into a Mail.app Fan
Friday, June 20th, 2008
Here’s a nice story.
Michelle Lentz, a US technology writer, has recently switched from PC to Mac. She was tempted to stick with Entourage 
for her email–”I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products”.
But she was brave. She transferred all her email over and was delighted by discoveries like Mail.app’s rules-based ability to change the background colour of emails. (”I actually couldn’t do this in Outlook.”)
But what really turned her head around was the wealth of plugins that allow Mail.app users to tweak and extend the app to meet their needs:
…I used a bunch of plug-ins to make it a more useful productivity tool for me. I was not happy with the way the ToDos worked, plus I wasn’t overly thrilled with how I had to manually file things. I remembered that a lot of these things I had fixed in Outlook as well using plug-ins. I was thrilled to find tons of Mail.app plug-ins.
She found - and loves - MailTags, MsgFiler, Mail.appetizer (recently updated for Leopard), MenuCalendarClock and (briefly) Letterbox , a fair number of the plugins in the Hawk Wings Top Ten Plugins list.
And the end result?
Tags: Apple Mail, entourage, leopard mail, mail.app, outlook, plugins, Productivity, rules, smart mailboxes, switchingI’ve made Mail just as productive, if not moreso, than how I was running Outlook. This I can live with.
John Maisley has updated his YAI (You Are Invited!) plugin for Leopard.
Aaron Harnly has taken an “all-too-welcome distraction from pressing schoolwork” to update his widescreen plugin 
Dane Harnett has released a new and improved version of his wide-screen plugin for Leopard Mail.
Dane Harnett has updated his new WideScreenMail plugin, giving it the much-asked for two-line preview à la Entourage.
Dane Harnett has released a widescreen plugin for Leopard Mail, which gives Mail.app an “Entourage” or “Outlook” look.
