It has only been a day, or so, since Office for Mac 2008, and its communications and organization suite, Entourage, appeared in my mailbox. I am still playing with it, and learning the subtle quirks of the system. So, at this early stage, how does Entourage compare to Apple Mail, the mail client that ships with OS X?
First, configuring Entourage for mail. Odd. Set up was smooth enough, but, for some reason, Apple Mail and Entourage don’t seem to play well together. Every time I launch Entourage, Apple Mail loses its password for outgoing messages. So, I have to go into Preferences and replace it — every time. That, I simply can’t explain. Further, once I got Entourage up for the first time, I lost all connectivity, for all my computers. Again, that is something I can’t figure.
Since I joined the world of Undead Apple Zombies several months ago, I have really come to like Apple Mail. It’s simple and elegant — useful features in a mail client. But, I am willing to give something new a try.
Entourage? Certainly NOT simple, at least by comparison. Admittedly, it does a bunch of things under one roof. That, for some, is a plus. But, it sure is clunky and cluttered if you just want to get the latest e-mail from Aunt Martha or that “friend” your spouse doesn’t know about. Sure, if you have used Outlook in the past, as I have, navigating through Entourage ain’t that hard. But, why bother, when they are easier ways to get things done? There is more than one way to skin a cat (but, cats hate all of ‘em).
Apple Mail? Easy. Fun. And above all, it’s well-integrated into the OS, especially in the Leopard version. Everything from Address Book to iChat is seamless. It “just works” (hey, maybe Apple should use that). Plus, it’s fast. Really fast. You notice that when compared to bloated Outlook, er, Entourage. And, it’s not as if the suite of programs Apple provides is missing much. The latest version of Apple Mail has some really neat features. I use Quick Look, for instance, all the time.
If you use MS Exchange, by all means, use Entourage. That might be the only way to go. But, if you’re a home user, pounding at e-mails at a normal clip, Apple Mail, I believe is preferable.
I gotta’ be fair. I do have some friends who use and like Entourage. It’s just that I’m not seeing them anymore.
Brains…
peterbaskind@gmail.com
Quote: “So, at this early stage, how does Entourage compare to Apple Mail, the mail client that ships with OS X?”
Where was the comparison? This isn’t a review – it’s a commentary that Entourage isn’t as lightweight as Apple Mail. Guess what? We knew this already! They’re targeted for different uses and users.
A review would go over Exchange connectivity, calendar functionality, any additions or changes to project tracking, notes or tasks. Were there improvements to the address book?
Well, keep getting emails from Aunt Martha. Meanwhile, the rest of us have work to do and would like to know how well the new Entourage will help us do that.
I agree with Chris.
A comparison would require, at least, a list of functionalities that a program has and the other hasn’t.
This way it just seems that you prefer mail just because Entourage is from Microsoft.
I’ve been using Entourage 2004 and Tiger mail for over a year trying to “love” Mail. I hated the unreliability of Entourage and the brain lack of features of Mail. Now I’m using Leopard Mail and Entourage 2008. Entourage seems a lot more robust than 2004 but still hangs up when the database gets too big. It still will not forward most attachments directly as will Mail and has a lame calendar that won’t seem to sync with iCal. It does have a more elegent folder system that will be hard to give up and I have not used it on an Exchange server. The Junk Mail filter is very lame and gets confused very easy. Their tech support sucks as in the past. Entourage 2008 hung again several times this morning until I moved some messages from Inbox and Sent box and rebuilt the database; shades of Outlook. I imagine this client would be great if you didn’t have a large number of messages.
Bottom line; I’m going to try again to “love” Mail and try again to convince myself to move to this mail client.
make that brain dead
Integrate Spamseive into Mail. Then it’s the perfect app.
Why does Peter Baskind sign off with a gmail address, not a apple mail address?
Makes me think apple mail isn’t that good
Actually Fred, Apple Mail coordinates your mail accounts into one application. I have a handful of email accounts, but I prefer to use gmail because I have had it longer than any of my other accounts (longer than I have had my Mac). With that said, I use Apple mail to funnel ALL of my accounts into one place. Also, when I send an email it goes out from mail but uses my gmail account.
I’ve not heard anyone comment on one feature within Entourage that seems absent in mac & that “Notes.” I read one individual say that “Entourage notes are just emails without an address,” but this is not true. Notes are a good place to store misc. info that you can organize by categories. These can function like tabs in an old day-timer notebook. If you’re syncing with a Blackberry or other PDA, notes can be very useful in planning, writing notes, & having certain info readily available. Is there something equivalent in mac os? I’m considering whether to upgrade to Entourage 08 or switch to the mac programs. I would miss the functionality of Notes.
Apple Mail already has notes in Leopard (don’t know about Tiger), although I don’t know if you can sync them to any device (not to the iPhone at least, but you can’t sync Entourage notes with iPhone’s anyway).
I’ve used both. Mail for my personal emails while Entourage for office works. With the latest updates of Leopard and Microsoft for mac, I found entourage very stable.
Here is my review:
- Read Email: Mail is better. It will highlighted the emails that connected but then I can’t change the setting to make emails still marked as unread until I double click them. Normally I won’t re-read email, so if I mistakenly click an email without realizing it, I will miss the email
- Email Folder: Entourage is better. I sometimes missed some email that filtered directly into Mail folder. The update of how many unread email in a folder is quicker in entourage
- Integration: In a mac system, clearly Mail will integrate better with other mac application.
- Mail System: Entourage seems more reliable to handle big emails and if you received hundreds of important email per day, I can’t trust Apple Mail over Entourage. I feel entourage more reliable here.
- Entourage divide the emails based on dates such as today, yesterday, last week, last month, this year and last year. This really helps me which one has been delayed for my answer. Also the I can set for the unread email to be put in priority (on the top of other emails).
So, to summarize, I think entourage is more complicated but for office works that handle many emails, entourage is better. My office doesn’t use Exchange but even so, entourage is still better and I never miss any email anymore.
Mail is okay for personal and fun to use. I want to love Mail but it let me down in several occasions. I want to use it again for my next job.
For additional information, I’m not an expert on this but use them a lot. So, I guess this is a review from a beginner level user and I believe there are so many users like me compared to the expert one.
I found my way here because I’m a long-time Entourage 2004 business user (on a couple of iBooks) and really like it except for the fact that, as a filing cabinet, when it gets to big, you can’t back it up without an error stopping the whole backup.
On my first iBook (titanium) the file got corrupted a few times; on my current one (G4) over the last 3 years, that hasn’t been a problem, but I’ve been lucky with my infrequent or impossible backups and periodic purging. So, my question to those who might have experience is this: now that I’ve upgraded to a MacBook Pro, is there anything, such as Apple Mail, more stable than Entourage 2008 when it gets big? The program is fine for me, but I need reliability.
I may not have a choice as I think I will soon be hooked into an Exchange server, but I’m curious to know what’s out there.
I just switched from PC/Outlook to Apple/Mail. I like Mail, BUT, it won’t: automatically correct spelling; capitalize “i” or first letter of sentences; drop the second capital letter when hit in error.
Why not?
Any way to add these?
Thanks.
Philip
I’ve just been experimenting with Entourage 2008 for about a week now. Like that I can set a timer for marking a message as ‘read’ – really miss that feature in Mail. Also prefer the spell check features in Entourage.
That said … I think I’m going back to Mail. I really miss the attachment preview and it does seem to be much quicker.
I am a longtime Outlook user, but after switching from a Windows PC to a Mac at home, I am reconsidering our e-mail client.
I setup Mail on my parents iMac, and they really like it. It was easy to setup.
My goal is to manage multiple accounts. We have a number of accounts that need to be brought into a single application (personal e-mail address for friends and family, marketing e-mail address for businesses – can be changed in the event of spam). Both products solve this.
I like the comparison that “phassat” provided. Overall, for home use, I will go with the “native” Mail in OS X and continue to use Outlook (Windows) for work.
I have been sending messages like this to Apple twice before, to no avail whatsoever:
1) I use two SMTP servers, one at home, one at work. Thus I receive mails sent to both addresses. When I do an automatic reply, mail picks as SMTP server the one corresponding to the address where I received the mail. If I reply from work to a mail sent to my home address, Mail picks the wrong SMTP, and the mail sits in the outbox until i find out. Sometimes urgent mails sit in the outbox for days. Couldn’t you guys change the script in a way that Mail toggles among all available SMTP servers in my settings, until it finds the one that is currently active? If there is a way to set Mail to do so in the current version, then it is certainly not straightforward.
2) When i find out that mail si attempting to send a mail from the damn wrong SMTP server and try to change it to the right one, Mail keeps trying the wrong one for MINUTES and fails to make the change. I literally have to QUIT the application and re-start it in order to make it do the right thing. Extremely irritating.
3) Very simply, could you make the outbox icon flash in the main window if there are unsent mails in it?
I’ve spent hours trying to get Hotmail working again after their upgrade with Entourage, both Microsoft products. Without success.
For several months, during one software release, Microsoft Word stopped working and trashed so many of my documents I had to swap to Neo Office temporarily.
I was part of Microsoft’s Market Research program back in 1985, as a member of the IT community and there I advised them to give priority to reliability rather than clever features. They obviously thought they knew better.
I would say that the time has arrived where Mac software is chosen over Microsoft purely as long term strategy for efficiency.
Giacomo Consalez – it’s very simple, just uncheck “use only this server” in the preference panel (accounts information). It will then try your other server connections when the chosen smtp server is unavailable.
I have just switched from Microsoft to Apple. Ideally I would like to mirror my settings in Outlook including using Word as the editor for emails, to either Mail or Entourage. I am still not clear which is the better program to migrate to. One suggestion given is to download Outlook2Mail on my Windows laptop, set the locale on the Windows laptop to en-US and then run O2M.
In addition, having created a Gmail account in Mail, all my emails on the server (thousands of them) were transferred to my Inbox. I want my Inbox to comprise current emails only. Do I need to change my settings in Gmail to transfer only those emails starting from a current date?
Would appreciate your help in making my transition as smooth as possible.