Entourage or OS X Mail/Address Book/iCal combo?

[Mac+]

When 10.2 came out, I made the conscious decision to work with Apple's Mail, Address Book and iCal apps, porting my contacts from Entourage over to the Address Book and starting to use iCal.

The reason being was that I realised Address Book would be accessible by the OS, whereas Entourage only knew Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Additionally, the Apple apps would integrate seamlessly with .mac - and I figured this was a good thing.

However, today I received my Mactopia newsletter and I decided to fire up Entourage to check out the news group reader feature. It got me sort of wistful. Entourage has it all in the one neat window and this newsgroup reader feature is really quite cool. I now wish Mail had it - maybe it does, please tell me if so. :) (Btw - this is just Office v.X - not Office:2004 - I sort of think that the Project Centre feature would even further enhance Entourage's usefulness.)

So my question is...

What do you folks use - are you Apple only for Mail/Address Book/iCal or are there some of you who prefer the single window of Entourage and some of its added features? Or maybe you rely on something else entirely?

I think I will update to Office:2004 at some stage - primarily for Word (note-taking) and Excel (print enhancements). However, on this basis, if I one day also get Keynote, then that means I'm really paying for PowerPoint and Entourage which I'll probably never use. Would you purchase the upgrade to Office:2004 if this was the case on your machine? :confused:

Look forward to the opinions and discussion. :D

[Mac+]

Now that there's more traffic here I thought that I might * bump * this and see if anybody has anything to add.

[Brad]

Polls are a good way, generally, to elicit responses. :) I'm adding a poll here...

For the record, I'm a Mail.app user. I'll gladly take true native UI and services over the competitors' self-contained solutions.

[Mac+]

Thanks Brad - I prefer native UI and service too, but I still feel that Mail could be further enhanced with a newsgroup reader feature like Entourage.

(Also, iCal should automatically pick up the birthdates from the Address Book - maybe this happens with Panther - but definitely not with Jaguar... I had to resort to "iCal Birthday Shifter" :grumble: )

[pscates2.0]

I have Office v.X but barely use any part of it, honestly. I just always use TextEdit, Keynote and I totally dig the Mail/Address Book/iCal combo. Just feels "right". I might be a bit biased though, I'll admit.

Regarding the birthday thing, yeah you think that would be a no-brainer to have that feature (Address Book and iCal and even .Mac work together to automatically notify and give you the option of automatically sending an iCard to whoever's birthday it is that day, if they're in your Address Book). :)

Maybe Tiger? After all, we didn't see all 150 of those new features at WWDC...how hard could this be to do?

[sunrain]

I also use Apple's native apps. I was motivated initially as an angry switcher and didn't want to have anything to do with microsoft. I even used OpenOffice for a bit. (boy is it not ready for the limelight yet) I get along just fine with Apple's native apps and I don't see myself moving over to Entourage any time soon.

[Luca]

Entourage blows. Don't use it (unless, like some unfortunate souls, you HAVE to).

No spam filtering. It has a so-called junk mail filter, but it's a really, really bad one (unlike Apple's, which is a really, really good one). The way it stores email (huge, single database file that can get corrupted and lose everything) is also stupid. It doesn't behave like an OS X program either. I HATE Entourage's toolbar - you can't customize it, so you're stuck with the default button set. They end up including about two dozen useless buttons, and when you resize the window to be smaller, their labels disappear in a pre-specified order. If you don't need, say, the "Flag" button, you can't get rid of it to give the other buttons more room. You just have to put up with it.

Argh, that toolbar is still making me angry even though I haven't used it in a while! That and tooltips - those little tooltips are everywhere.

And the fact that it keeps its own address book instead of just using OS X's built in one is stupid too.

Don't use Entourage!

[Escher]

Thanks Brad - I prefer native UI and service too, but I still feel that Mail could be further enhanced with a newsgroup reader feature like Entourage. [/i]

I'm a long-time Eudora user. When Apple demo'ed Spotlight at WWDC, I figured that maybe it was time to migrate to Mail.app at the same time I was moving up to Panther with my 12-inch PowerBook. But I just don't have the guts to abandon Eudora for Mail's new (to me) interface.

I generally hate kitchen-sink solutions like Entourage. I much prefer small dedicated apps that are the very best at performing their assigned task. If I needed a newsreader, I would use Panic's Unison (http://www.panic.com/unison/).

For PIM, I haven't decided whether to stick with Palm Desktop or migrate to Address Book and iCal. Don't have time for the conversion right now, so I'm sticking to my good old Palm (IIIxe) and backing up to my Wintel box.

Escher

[staph]

fetchmail + procmail + pine (http://www.washington.edu/pine/), baby! :)

I'm considering mutt, but at this point I really couldn't be bothered.

[ast3r3x]

Mail.app combined with...oh yeah mail.app. I don't use iCal (except for the reminder every week to take out the garbage at 10PM on mondays) and Address Book, I have just started using recently to keep track of everyone's cell number. I suppose all of that will be more important to me once I actually have something to do other then go to work and hang out with friends ;)

[murbot]

I'm curioius - could you diehard Mail.app users outline how you back up your emails? Do you have filters set to copy all mail to other folders, then back those up? Do you just back up your entire Mail folder, and end up with multiple backups that you sort by date?

I'll admit that I'm brutal in this regard. I use Mail, but I think I have about 600 emails in my inbox. I just keep them there, search when I need to find something... I need to get off my butt and clean house. Any killer power tips for me as I begin cleaning things out and backing things up? :)

Oh, and I was using Entourage for about a week last month, until for some reason it decided to download EVERY message from the server AGAIN. I bombed the whore off my hard drive. (also had the big database corruption last year)