Saturday InBox: Email Generates More Email, Comments

By Bambi Brannan | Saturday, August 21, 2004 | Home » Email In Box »

Surprisingly, the article on Best Email Program On The Planet caused the most email excitement. One reader took us to task about our conclusion:

1) entourage costs money. mail is free. 2) mail integrates with iChat and AddressBook flawlessly 3) mail does ONE thing, not 4 (calendar, address book, mail, tasks). 4) it has all the major features you could ask for in a mail client, and then some 5) it is the only email client i’ve ever seen that just “gets” imap mail right. if you have multiple accounts, it doesn’t make multiple trees. instead it merges the trees. (i.e. i see ONE Inbox folder, with a sub folder for each account). i *hate* dealing with separate email accounts separately. my email is one big pool. i can simply look at the To: field if i actually care which email account received it.”

There’s no accounting for taste, is there? While Apple’s Mail.app is the cat’s pajamas for some, more than a few, begrudgingly, I’m sure, agreed with our assessment of Microsoft’s Entourage.

“I couldn’t agree more—Entourage is the champ. I’ve been using mail.app as a standalone app and as an Exchange client, and it’s just lacking certain key features, which is really annoying after awhile. After eight months of using Mail, I’m so relieved to be using Entourage 2004.

I was a longtime user of Outlook ‘97 and 2000 for PC before I switched to Mac full-time, so I’ve been missing a lot of the functionality that Outlook offered. Entourage 2004 brings all of this back, and more. The Exchange compatibility works flawlessly now, which is huge for business users, as mentioned. The calendar functionality is especially critical, and is perfect in Entourage 2004. Inexplicably, if you configure Mail.app to be an Exchange client, it doesn’t show meeting requests!! But if you configure the account as IMAP or POP they show up, and you can add them to iCal. Don’t know what Apple’s thinking on that one; that’s a pretty huge bug and there’s a ton of commentary about it on their web-boards. I agree that Mail is a good product for free, but Apple could make it so much better without that much additional investment. And that only helps their TCO arguments.

Project Center in Entourage 2004 is superb. I’m using it all the time now, it’s a great organizational tool. “

Someone pointed out that we didn’t list the venerable Eudora email program. That was an oversight. We only received one email message about it, though.

Browsers? That’s a different breed and this week was definitely browser week with three articles published.

1 - Netscapes new version

2 - Browser: The Good, Bad, Ugly, Part 1, and

3 - Browsers: Good, Bad, VERY Ugly, Part 2, with a Poll

Not surprisingly is the number of readers who agreed with what’s Good, what’s Bad, what’s ugly. We always look for a reader response that sums up a 1,000 word article in the fewest words.

“Safari and Firefox are good, and Camino isn’t too far behind. I wouldn’t put Mozilla in the same category as them though, it’s just a clunky browser. OmniWeb is pretty good, but it is still inferior to Safari or Firefox, so i’d have to kick it back a notch. MacIE certainly does suck. “

See? We could’ve save millions of bits.

Some readers found a few Firefox and Camino bugs. Others were anxious to see the goodies in Safari 2.0, due next year. One thing’s for sure, email and browsers are easily the killer applications on computers these days. Say something bad about the Mac and people respond. Say something bad about their email program, they respond (fewer, though), too.

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Classy Mac360 Photo By Bambi Brannan | I work in public relations in San Francisco, California. I truly love Macs, my husband, both of my pet fish, high heels, dinner out, and chocolate. Not always in that order. Follow me on Twitter.

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