[kevinjamessmith]

I find Entourage to be a lot more intuitive to use than Mail.

Whenever I think about doing something in Entourage it usually works exactly as I think it should, whereas doing the same thing in Mail often involves a couple minutes of futzing around trying to figure out how to do what I want to do. For example, let's say you want to add someone's contact to your address book and they've just emailed you. In Entourage there is a little figure of a guy with a down triangle next to it by the sender's name, so you know that there is a dropdown menu there and that if you click it you will probably be given the option of saving the person's address to the Entourage address book. In Mail, this does in fact work basically the same way - you click on the sender's name - but there is absolutely no indication whatsoever that clicking the sender's name will give you a dropdown menu. It looks like regular text until you click it - you just have to know to click it.

[ByTe-SiZe]

I personally much prefer Mail. I know what you mean about those menus, but I'm used to it and I know they are there. Plus, I like how Mail works with iPhoto when you receive pics, and of course, Spotlight built-in. To me, Mail is much simpler to use. To each, his own.

[MitchA]

i Too prefer Mail. I haven't used Entourage for anything more than fooling around, but I found it to have too many features that I Don't and won't be needing to use. Mail is fast, simple to use, and pretty powerful as far as I am concerned.

[mTorbin]

First of all, if you haven't guessed, I'm fanatic about Apple and I REALLY don't like Microsoft Therefore, if I can avoid using Microsoft, I do, even at a higher expense.

Secondly, why use a third party application when you can use something that is bundled with the OS itself? There's nothing that Entourage can do that Mac Mail cannot (I believe). Everything I need from a professiional, multi-email acount application I can get from Mail.

"Once you go Mac, you'll never go back!"

- MT

[The Dead Herring]

mTorbin said:

First of all, if you haven't guessed, I'm fanatic about Apple and I REALLY don't like Microsoft  Therefore, if I can avoid using Microsoft, I do, even at a higher expense.

Secondly, why use a third party application when you can use something that is bundled with the OS itself?  There's nothing that Entourage can do that Mac Mail cannot (I believe).  Everything I need from a professiional, multi-email acount application I can get from Mail.

"Once you go Mac, you'll never go back!"

- MT

agreed, this is the 'maccast' forum for god's sake! What do you think we are going to say. Apple mail is great in its syncronisation with address book.

[Rob]

I'm a Mail user.

I read this article a while ago. It just took me a few days to find when this thread posted. It will give everyone a few things to think about, not that you'll agree with it.

The Best Mac Email Application

-Rob

[mTorbin]

I'm sorry, but I just don't agree with the article, regardless of how detailed their explanation was. I have always believed that applications for email, photos and music should be native to the OS and in Tiger, they are.

- MT

[houltmac]

As Torbin said, Mail is bundled with the OS, it does everything an e-mail client (aggrigator) is supposed to (it reads, writes and stores e-mails), it's simple, clean, elegant, has Spotlight built right in, intergrates well with other basic software (ie. Address Book, iChat, iPhoto, iTunes and QuickTime) and has never given me a problem. Simplicity is what I need, and simplicity Mail gives me.

[Jubilee]

My company uses Entourage and that's all i have been using. I find personally that its all tied together and very convenient with its own address book, calendar, and project planner in one Application.
So I don't have to open 3 or 4 different apps to plan meetings, email and find contacts.

But that's just me!

[houltmac]

Jubilee said:

My company uses Entourage and that's all i have been using.  I find personally that its all tied together and very convenient with its own address book, calendar, and project planner in one Application.
So I don't have to open 3 or 4 different apps to plan meetings, email and find contacts.

But that's just me!  

That's what I like about the Apple apps. Like Mozilla try and do; they are clean versions of what they are supposed to be and nothing more. That said; they do tie into each other seemlessly, as if they were all one big application, without having to run them all and hog resources.

[monofonik]

I just use Gmail's web interface. Pretty smooth and works real well.

As for Entourage, it's got a kind of iCal thing built into it doesn't it? So I guess there's that.

[Alan Gabrielli]

I switched from Eudora to Mail, and in retrospect, I'd have to say Eudora is better. Mail has the advantage of handling html much better than Eudora, and of course, it looks much better, but Eudora is much faster and handles large folders of mail much better than Mail.

If you don't need an email client that handles html, and don't mind the clunky look and feel, I strongly recommend Eudora.

Can't speak on the Entourage thing, but my instinct says avoid it.

[kevinjamessmith]

I use multiple web browsers and get frustrated when I click on a link in an email and the only option is for it to open in my default browser, since I don't always want to open the link in my default browser. Today I finally got sick of this and tried control-clicking on a link in an email in Entourage. Among the options in the popup menu was one 'Execute Script'. You can add your own scripts to this menu. I was really excited about this great feature. Now if I am using Camino and don't want to open Safari (my default browser) if I don't have to I can just click on the 'Open link in Camino' script I added. Great! Unfortunately, I tried the same trick in Apple's Mail only to find that Mail doesn't offer this little treasure.

Really, you guys go on about "Down with Microsoft." "I hate Microsoft." Etc. This is the MacCast. Yeah. I love my Mac and all the great software out there for it, but I am not afraid to admit that sometimes third parties offer far better solutions than Apple, even if that third party is Microsoft. And you know, it's fine and all to prefer Mail to Entourage - to each his own - but what features does Mail offer that Entourage doesn't? Hating Entourage just because it's Microsoft isn't very logical.

Seriously, I wish Mail was Entourage. I prefer how Apple divides Mail, Address Book and iCal up into different apps, and I use each of those apps because of their integration with the OS and ability to sync them to my iDisk - which are features Mail offers that Entourage doesn't, but only because Mail has the benefit of being integrated with the OS, which no third party solution can do, by the way - but man, almost every day I find another reason why Entourage beats each of those apps in intuition and functionality.

[treadlightly]

I've used both Entourage and Mail pretty heavily over the last couple years. I think they each have their purpose. I use Mail at home simply because its lighter weight, meaning that its not trying to do everything at once. At my previous job I was the only Mac in the office, so Entourage was extremely helpful. It worked much better with our Windows server setup. As I'm sitting here thinking about it, though, I'm wondering if I'd be happier switching to Entourage at home too. I rarely use Calendar because it doesn't respond the way I expect. The result is that I hardly touch Calendar. Mail also toasted on me when I tried to add my gmail account. Having four accounts seemed to really do it in, or at least, putting gmail in with three others seemed to do it. I now have three email accounts on one Mac and two on another. Somewhat inconvenient. Guess I'll have to play around a bit and see...

[macmekker]

Hi. I - and a staff of 20 people - have been through years of Entourage on OS9, on OSX and the last year or so - using Apples Mail exclusively. I feel we lost some features moving to Mail, and gained quite a few others. The total integration of the Apple apps being one of them (and it keeps getting better).

But the main reason for me to move my staff to Mail was the file-size. My employees get approx. 4000 mails a month and with Entourage all the data is placed in one file, with a limit of 2 GB (at that time anyway). Which meant that some of my employees would hit the roof now and then (if I or them slipped in the maintenance routines) and the file would go corrupt.

With Mail each new mailbox generates a new file, so this gave me much more flexibility. Having said that, my advise is: Don't let the mailboxes get bigger than +/- 8000 mails in Mail either. Then the index gets corrupt, and after rebuilding it, it will show zero messages in the mailbox, but the mailbox-file will still be +/- 1GB... So the messages is still in there somewhere...