By John Livingston
Posted April 21, 2006
Below is an outline from our April Office Applications SIG Meeting, comparing Apple's Mail and Microsoft's Entourage.
| Entourage | Apple Mail / iCal / Address Book |
| Overview of components: Mail, AddressBook, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Project Center. | Separate Mail, iCal, and Address Book applications. |
| Does Hotmail, POP, IMAP, and Microsoft - NOT dBug - Exchange. | Does Hotmail with free HTTPMail plugin, POP, IMAP, and Microsoft - NOT dBug - Exchange. |
| You must pay $19.95 a year for Hotmail Plus in order for it to work on ANY mail client. | |
| In Hotmail, difficulties with rules when using rules to send mail to separate mailboxes-Entourage tries to re-send messages and might delete them from the Internet server. | Mail rules work equally well on POP mail and Hotmail. |
| In Entourage, have to create two sets of rules-one for POP mail and one for Hotmail. | In Mail, one rule applies to both accounts. |
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What are rules? Rules allow you to filter out incoming mail. You can delete it, put it in special mailboxes or folders, mark it with colors, and even apply sounds. (Except Entourage limits you to just four sounds, while Apple Mail allows you to use existing System Sounds.) |
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| Very difficult to sift through Entourage rules if you want to change them. | |
| In Entourage, have choices of just four or five sounds. | Mail will load any alert sound available to OS X. |
| Spamblocker mail from Earthlink shows annoying headings in Mail, which require human intervention. | |
| Entourage fairly automatically loads calendar appointments and sends them (demo this). | In Mail, this can be tricky. (Receive the calendar appointment from Entourage. Then, try to originate one in iCal and send it to Entourage. |
| Entourage opens a new mail window with Command-N. | Mail opens a new mail window with Option-Command-N. |
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Entourage's Address Book allows the user to define categories and assign them to different addresses. These categories DON'T copy to other computers and may not work on Palm Pilots. |
Address Book has one main source. The user can then add sub-address books and manually copy main addresses into it. |
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Entourage's calendar allows the user to define categories and assign them to different calendar events. These categories DON'T copy to other computers and may not work on Palm Pilots. |
The user can add different calendars to iCal. However, there appears to be no main calendar. |
| Where are files backed up? | |
| /Users/(Me) the logged-in user/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 (or X) Identities/Main Identity for all three. Yikes! |
/Users/(Me) the logged-in user/Library/Application Support/iCal/Sources/(name of calendar file) for calendars. /Users/(Me) the logged-in user/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/ for Address Book contacts. /Users/(Me) the logged-in user/Library/Mail/ for Mail's data. |
