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.”entourage, mail.app, apple mail, spotlight, syncing, certificates, email, switching

Merlin Mann has served up another cracker post in his Inbox Zero series. He points out the importance of interrogating every piece of email that enters your inbox. Don’t assume it’s important. Don’t feel obliged to reply just because someone sent it to you. Don’t do the Pavlov’s Dog thing.

Rather, he suggests, ask each email as it comes in:

1. What does this message mean to me, and why do I care?
2. What action, if any, does this message require of me?
3. What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains?

Of course, Merlin crafts it all with characteristic verve and wit, so you should read the whole post.

Learn how your emails to Merlin only have a 50% chance of making it past the first question. It’s a jungle out there.

On macOSXHints, sap.1 outlines a simple but clever way to use Address Book, Spotlight, and Smart Mailboxes in Mail.app to stay on top of a particular set of email obligations. It involves using the power of Smart Mailboxes to sort and present emails in a helpful and efficient way.mail.app, apple mail, tips, email, triage, spotlight, address book, smart mailboxes, productivity

Some reports on the new Spotlight-enabled, sync-able Entourage are starting to trickle out into the blogging world.

Sven Semmler was delighted to see the latest service pack. He tried to use MailTags and Mail.app to organize himself after the GTD fashion, but found it didn’t work out for him.

Since moving over to try the new Entourage he is more than happy: “All I can say is: wow! Never before a service pack made me that happy. Big thanks to Redmond! You guys made my day.”

Michael at blindsquirrel.org also switched from Mail.app. Not that he was unhappy with it, just bored. He likes what he sees in the new Entourage but he does have one criticism:

The only weakness I see with the entourage syncing is that it can only sync with one calendar in iCal, and that calendar is a new one listed as entourage in the iCal interface. So if you have a bunch of calendars in iCal you have to switch their items over to the entourage calendar for them to automatically sync with the entourage calendar.

UPDATE: David Chartier at TUAW tells a cautionary tale about syncing his Address Book through the new Entourage. Ouch!entourage, spotlight, syncing, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, GTD, ical

Entourage finally gets Spotlight support in an update for Microsoft Office for Mac 2004 released today.

The update features improvements to all the Office apps, but Entourage gets some features that users have long been asking for. (Remember the Entourage developer who posted here in January looking for user feedback and feature suggestions?)

According to the release notes:

• Entourage now syncs with Mac OS X Sync Services. Users of Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later versions of Mac OS can synchronize Entourage items with other programs, such as Address Book and iCal. You can also synchronize items with other Macintosh computers via Apple’s .Mac online services, and with portable devices, such as phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
• Users of Mac OS X 10.4 or later versions of Mac OS can use Spotlight to search Entourage items. You can use Spotlight to index all unencrypted Entourage items and search their contents.
• Entourage can use smart cards to sign, encrypt, and decrypt e-mail messages. For users of Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later versions of Mac OS, this update provides improved compatibility with Mac OS keychain support for smart cards, such as Common Access Cards. As a result, Entourage can use certificates and private keys stored on smart cards to sign, encrypt, and decrypt Entourage e-mail messages.
• SSL connections to Mac OS X 10.4 servers work correctly Entourage and other Office programs are more compatible with self-signed certificates, which are used to establish secure (SSL) connections to servers running Mac OS X 10.4 Server.
• Entourage is smarter about handling iCal invitations

Entourage, Microsoft, office for mac, spotlight, syncing, ical, address book, SSL

MacGeekery has posted a piece on smart mailboxes.

It explains what smart mailboxes are, how they don’t really “contain” emails and how, in fact, they don’t even really exist.

It also shows you how to use them to search your email most efficiently and quickly by using information stored in Mail’s own database rather than relying on Spotlight.

After digesting that, you could move on to Joe Kissell’s MacWorld article on Smart Mailboxes for more tips and tricks.

[Via TUAW ]smart mailboxes, spotlight, envelope index, sqlite, mail.app, apple mail, joe kissell

Microsoft has announced at MacWorld San Francisco that Entourage will soon have Spotlight and iSync support.

From March this year, Entourage users will be able to search their emails with Spotlight, finally bringing Entourage into line with Word, PowerPoint and Excel, which already have Spotlight support.

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit will also bring iSync support to Entourage, so that users will soon be able to sync their Entourage calendar, address book, notes and tasks with handheld devices that also work with Sync Services.

Entourage will also gain new converters to allow it to read the new Microsoft Open Office XML formats.

Microsoft introduced these improvements as part of a promise to continue the development of Office for Mac for another five years. ?¢‚Ǩ?ìWe?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve had many years of success with Office for Mac”, Microsoft Consumer Productivity VP Tom Gibbons said in a press release, “and this formal commitment confirms that we?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re in the Mac business for the long haul.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

[Thanks, Dan!].

The full text of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit after the jump…

(more…)

Last October, Joe Kissell (author of Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger), wrote a piece for MacWorld on smart mailboxes and how to use them.

Now he widens the scope with an online article at MacWorld on smart folders and Spotlight searches.

Among other things, he shows you how to create a raw query for a smart folder that will find all the Mail.app messages and Word documents on your computer which contain a particular Spotlight comment. Very useful. Very smart.