Jesse Hollington saw a recent post on Hawk Wings about how Mail.app bests Entourage and emailed me a thoughtful account of his own experiences. It’s good enough to share.

I’m an IT Consultant with a good number of years in the business of e-mail systems specifically, and of course am saddled with Exchange on the back-end for my corporate mail for various reasons, the most notable being Blackberry integration.

I’m also a “switcher” having liked the Mac for some time, but having been afraid that it wouldn’t quite do what I needed it to do (with groupware access being high on the list — I saw “groupware” rather than “e-mail” because we’re talking calendars, tasks, and all of the other myriad items that come with doing business). The availability of Entourage and its integration with Exchange was a huge selling point for switching to a Mac last year.

Although I started on Entourage, however, I’ve been back and forth between Entourage and the iApps about three or four times, but think I’ve finally settled back down on the iApps.

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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?

Sometimes, 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.

entourage, mail.app, apple mail, switching, email in general, email, microsoft

Andreas Amann has updated his very useful Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, a utility that simplifies the process of switching from Eudora or Thunderbird to Mail.app.

In particular, the app is much smarter about importing Eudora nicknames and much better at parsing them. It no longer identifies some nicknames as mailing lists. The whole importing process is much faster.

A number of smaller tweaks make EMC more stable, especially during the initial scan of files to be imported.

There has never been a better time to switch from Eudora.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is freeware (donations not refused) and is available from Andrea’s web site.mail.app, apple mail. eudora, thunderbird, switching, importing, nicknames, plugins, helpful apps

Dave Hamilton from the Mac Observer is thinking about switching to Mail.app.

He has had a gutful of his old mail client:

Mailsmith, by most rights, has stagnated. It pains me to write this, because as I said, I’m a really big fan of BareBones, and enjoy a great working relationship with their head-honcho, Rich Siegel. But it’s true… Mailsmith hasn’t had a public release/update since March of 2005. Now some folks may argue that it doesn’t need an update, and for those folks, I’m sure that’s correct. My big problem is that I manage a LOT of e-mail… I have almost 1400 mailboxes within which are nearly 200,000 e-mail messages. I pretty much save everything, and it’s saved my ass in HUGE ways over the years, so I ain’t gonna stop.

So, he wonders, does Mail.app have what it takes to manage a large number of mailboxes and bucketloads of email? Or is he better off archiving off a large slab of the emails and staying with Mailsmith?

My advice is not much good. I only have about 35,000 emails spread over four IMAP accounts and about ten mailboxes (see further, “How the delete key is your best friend”). That’s chicken feed by Dave’s standards.

Justin Blanton once ran a challenge to find the largest Mail mailbox, putting up his own inbox of 22,000 as a candidate.

What’s your experience? What’s your biggest mailbox? How many mailboxes does your Mail.app handle without working up a sweat?

Can Mail.app take the load? Does size matter?mail.app, apple mail, mailboxes, email volume, biggest mailbox, switching, Mailsmith, email in general

The Dashboard widget xCuts is a keyboard shortcuts reference that lets you easily browse the shortcuts for Mac OS X, Quicksilver and more.

A recent update adds a section for switchers, which gives them easy access to the Mac OS X equivalents for the Windows shortcuts they already know.

To save space, the widget can be collapsed to the small size of the graphic in the top right of this post. When you need it, click on it to expand to the full interface:

Searches can be focussed by category, scope and object. The magic is powered by a MySQL database, accessed over the web with Ajax.

xCuts is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adrian]keyboard shortcuts, mac osx, productivity, quicksilver, widget, dashboard, not apple mail, apple, switching

A month ago Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim torched off a mini-firestorm in the blogosphere by announcing that they were switching away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu.

Hawk Wings covered it because of Mail.app’s central role in Mark Pilgrim’s decision to switch away.

Now Tim Bray is almost having second thoughts. He has posted a list of things that Mac OS X does better and things that Ubuntu does better. Mac OS X wins out in some important areas.

Mail.app and iCal don’t fare so well though:

I have so had it with Apple applications. A couple weeks with Thunderbird made it obvious I should have long since dumped Mail.app. Every week iCal gets slower and every week I hate it more. When I was on Ubuntu, I maintained my schedule by typing it into a plain-text document in Emacs, and that was so much less painful.

No love lost there!

Given that the Mac vs. Ubuntu debate got caught up in the unrelated “proprietary vs. open format” issue, perhaps the most interesting sentence in the post is this:

now that I’ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesn’t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.

ubuntu, linux, mac OS X, Apple, Mac, mail.app, apple mail, ical, switching

Last Week macOSXHints ran a tip about using Mail.app’s “Save As…” option to export messages in mbox format.

Mark Pilgrim, who recently switched from OS X to Linux, takes the opportunity to point out that this option doesn’t create a valid mbox. Rather, it is another example of Apple’s wicked addiction to proprietary file formats.

Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark. It made him switch away. And the pain is still raw:

However, in the interests of fairness, I will amend my previous statement that Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with no possibility of exporting it to an open format. This is not true. Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with a tantalizingly broken export feature. I apologize for the confusion.

Mail.app. Gone but not easily forgotten.

Fortunately developers have found solutions and work-arounds for exporting Mail 2.0 messages. Mark could use either emlx to mbox converter or, better, the Archive script in Andreas Amann’s excellent Mail Scripts to solve his problem.mail.app, apple mail, pilgrim, mbox, emlx, exporting, switching