Re: Entourage versus Thunderbird versus Mail

On 2007-03-10 20:02:35 -0600, Michelle Steiner <michelle@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

In article <2007031019315574668-jollyroger@nullorg>,
Jolly Roger <jollyroger@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

From experience, I can tell you there are actually *plenty* of things
Entourage does better than Mail. I gave a couple miscellaneous
things as examples off the top of my head, but rest assured, there
are plenty others. But to tell you the truth, I don't see much
incentive for taking a lot of my time out to think of, list, and
explain all the differences here.

Imagine if someone dead-set against using Mail asking you to explain
all the intricacies of why Mail is better.

I am truly curious. When mail first came out, I disliked it so much
that I bought both Powermail and Mailsmith, but I liked Emailer so much
better than either of them, that I stuck with it even though it required
Classic. By the time MTNW became universal, mail had improved to the
point that it became tolerable to use, so I switched to it then so I
could close down Classic. Now I find that with the few things I
mentioned earlier, I actually like it.

I'm not asking you, or anyone else, to try to persuade me to switch; I'm
asking out of curiosity as to what it does better than mail, and/or what
it does that mail doesn't do at all.

Ok if you insist... : ) I'll give you a couple more off the top of my head. But, again, this is in *no* way anything near a complete list, and there very well may be better examples I simply haven't thought of this evening. And also keep in mind that, since I'm a power user, some of these may seem like very advanced features you might never use - but they are legitimate features that some of us do use very often:

* Mail has no smart mailing list manager like there is in Entourage. Instead you have to use Rules that are a pain to set up and maintain and aren't quite as powerful. Entourage mailing list manager can do much more than simply file email into folders. It can automatically burst digest messages into multiple individual messages, automatically apply categories to list messages, transparently change the default reply-to behavior of list messages, automatically delete copies of messages you send to the list that get echoed back to you, etc.

* Mail doesn't automatically link incoming and outgoing messages with addresses in your address book or events in calendars (this is a *very* handy feature of Entourage!). If I receive a message from my mom, it's automatically linked with my mom's address book entry, and applies whatever category my mom is in to the message as well so at a glance I can tell it's "Family" just by the color of the message in the list. If someone sends me an invite message, that message is automatically linked to the calendar event. If I get a meeting reminder notification, it's very handy to be able to open the linked email message to read any additional details about the meeting quickly.

* (Note this may have changed since the last time I looked) For some silly reason, Mail dumps IMAP messages in the same Inbox as POP and all other IMAP messages, making it so that you'll never know which messages actually reside on a given server as opposed to POP messages already deleted from their respective server. BAD IDEA APPLE! In Entourage, any "online" account has its own Inbox - there's never any confusion about this.

* Mail has no concept of "identities", which leaves those of us who use the same mail client for home and business (VPN) out in the cold; there is no way to set up one identity for home email accounts and another identity for VPN work accounts, so when you check mail while not connected to VPN, Mail tries (and fails) to contact your work server, and vice versa. Not only that, but home and work email ends up intermingled in the same Inbox (as mentioned above). Yuck!

* Mail uses a different default name for the Sent Items IMAP folder than popular email servers (like Earthlink.net, for instance). (I think Mail calls it "Sent Mail" by default, and on my server it is called "Sent Items"). But what *really* sucks about this is rather than simply detecting the difference and adjusting to it, Mail creates a *new* folder with that default name on the server and places sent messages into the new folder. To make matters worse, Mail *displays* an entirely different name in the left side of the Mail window ("Sent")! This gives you the impression that Mail's "Sent" folder is some sort of special folder that is not stored on the server (because if you look on the server outside of Mail or in another email client, there is no "Sent" folder there!). I can tell you from experience, this is utterly confusing to diagnose if you aren't aware of what mail is actually doing. What's worse, fixing it is even harder. You *should* be able to right-click the "Sent Items" folder and tell Mail to use that folder for sent messages; but I found that quite a few times when I right-clicked it, there was no such item in the contextual menu. This was a very frustrating ordeal. Apple can do better!

* Last time I looked, the AppleScript support in Entourage blew Mail's scripting support completely out of the water.

There. Like I said, there's much more - but you asked, so this should hold you over! : )

--
JR

.

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