Leopard’s Mail.app Makes Me Sad

Tagged Articles by Brent on October 31st, 2007

I’m really enjoying the move to Leopard. The new cat really screams on my MacBook Pro. I’ve been awaiting an Intel compatable version of Microsoft Office for a while now but since Apple released iWork ‘08, I’ve completely moved to Pages and Numbers for all office tasks. It looks like the only need for Office 08 is for Entourage. For those who don’t know, Entourage is a sister product to Microsoft Outlook for Windows. Outlook and Entourage have everything! You can mange tasks, calendars, sync your Windows Mobile device and manage your contacts. All of the features are extremely powerful and most important to me, both applications sync with my office’s Microsoft Exchange Server.

Yep, Entourage is what I need but when I switched to an Intel powered Macintosh, I gave up Entourage 2004 and moved to Apple Mail. I let go of a ton of great features but really appreciated the speed Apple’s own client provided. When Leopard was released, I was really hoping Apple stepped it up and I wouldn’t need to purchase Entourage 2008 when it came out in January. Well, Apple’s mail application doesn’t do anything that Entourage or Outlook can do.

I can’t manag contacts and calendars in one application and am forced to still navigate to Address Book and iCal for my “personal information management” or PIM for short. Another thing that’s not in Mail is native Exchange synchronization which would really make me happy. Apple’s entire mail interface is just too big! I’m not blind and would like some smaller folders. What really made me realize that this is not the mail application for me is when Apple included built in HTML stationaries. These stationaries are cute bubbly and perfect for grandma but for me, they make me angry.

I can turn off stationary view and even remove the stationary icon from my toolbar but I still know it’s there and it only makes me anticipate the next release of Entourage for Mac and that’s all I have to say about that.

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doog 11 months ago 1 point
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Funny, I actually prefer smaller, better, discrete PIM apps over monolithic ones. If Entourage is anything like Outlook, then it stores all of your PIM data in a single, monolithic, fairly proprietary file that, if corrupted, means that you corrupt everything.

The address book and iCal are pretty well integrated with Mail and that works well enough for me, and I can ignore HTML mail, just as I did when I used to use Outlook.

Of course, I have no need for Exchange integration, so perhaps that explains some.

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Aditya Naik 11 months ago 1 point
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Did i miss something here.. "an Intel compatable version of Microsoft Office"

i have a macbook and i use office on it all the time.. i used entourage for a while but i didnt like as much so i switched to mail..

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GeekLady 11 months ago 1 point
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He means an Intel native version. Right now it runs in Rosetta, I believe.

But seriously, the folders are too big? The folders and mailboxes in Mail's sidebar are the same size as the folders in Entourage's sidebar! Frankly, this is too small.

I know you can set up an Exchange account in Mail, even in Tiger, because I'm doing it right now, my email syncs just fine. If Mail can't do anything Outlook/Entourage can, then they must not deliver email.

Honestly this doesn't even read like he used Leopard Mail for more than 5 minutes.

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http://geeklady.wordpress.com

illovich 11 months ago 1 point
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I wish mail had some more features (I specifically wish it had a key that would toggle showing unread mail only -- I can kludge it with a "smart" folder, but...)

But I specifically dropped Entourage after the second time my mail glob got corrupted. I prefer an application that stores things separately, precisely because a failure of all your personal information is so painful.

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Tim Wilson 11 months ago 1 point
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Wow, I never thought I would hear of someone preferring Entourage. The great thing about Apple Mail is that is it lightweight, but still integrates with Address Book and iCal.

I found Entourage bulky, clunky, and ugly! sure Mail could have extra features, but I think its still heaps better :-)

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Jordan 11 months ago 1 point
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Yeah.. I'll stick to apple mail.

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http://jomilla.com

Rick Curran 11 months ago 1 point
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The all-in-one storage format of Entourage is a problem for the Time Machine backup too, if you've got a nice 2Gb file and you make a minor change then that whole 2Gb file gets backed up. Apple switched to a system of separate files back when Tiger was released in order to let Spotlight index these files more easily, this also works perfectly for Time Machine.

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http://suburbia.org.uk

Chris 9 months ago 1 point
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Apple Mail is great - unless you have imap accounts with a lot of messages, it dies almost every hour with my gmail IMAP.

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