Goodbye Thunderbird, Hello Entourage 2008
I’ve been a big fan of Thunderbird for a while now, but I’m moving on. Entourage 2008 is calling my name at work and I’m listening. I’m a bit sad to say goodbye to Thunderbird, but yet excited at the same time. So why the switch?
There are a few reasons for my switch to Entourage 2008. The biggest one is the calendar notifications. I continue to get more and more Outlook invites and updates and, where as Thunderbird and Lightning do an OK job, they are not the best. With Thunderbird and Lightning I can accept calendar events, but I can’t send an acceptance email that records my response in Outlook. It also doesn’t currently support updated events. Instead of moving the event, it just adds a second one to my calendar. And then there is the formatting issue. You open the invite in Thunderbird and it’s one big block of text. Entourage 2008 works with calendar events much better and I hope that some day, Thunderbird can match that.
Another downside to Thunderbird is message fonts. If I were to select a font for my messages, it’d either look tiny in my Thunderbird or it’d look big to Outlook users. It also didn’t carry the font through bullets and links and it just wasn’t fun. I had a hard time using the default font settings in Thunderbird as I knew that all the recipients were seeing a font like Times New Roman. So not pretty.
And then there is the luster of one application to replace four others. Not only is Entourage my email application, but my calendar, todo list and notes application all in one. I know that Thunderbird can do these too, with addons, but it’s just not as polished and integrated. Not yet anyways.
I do have high hopes for Thunderbird and hope that it continues to grow and become a real Entourage/Outlook competitor. But, for business purposes, Entourage looks as if it may be a better fit.
As I work on the transition from Thunderbird to Entourage, I’ll post updates and info along the way. I’m excited to try Entourage as I’ve never really used the application before. Entourage 2008 looks like a well designed and integrated application and I hope this is a good move.
If you have any Entourage tips, addons (or whatever they are called in Entourage) or thoughts to share, please do.
Does it not drive you crazy that Entourage 2008 does not remember window positions for composing, replying and reading (when not using the preview pane) mail messages?
- ptackbar February 4th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11 - Windows XP
Haven’t noticed that yet. But it does drive me crazy that I can’t insert a hyperlink on some text. Grrrrrr
- Thomas February 4th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Safari 523.10 - Mac OS X
If anyone knows how to work with Outlook meeting requests flawlessly in Mail.app, I’d be interested to hear it.
- Thomas February 5th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11 - Mac OS X
[...] I’ve made the switch from Thunderbird to Entourage 2008, one of my missing features is the ability to sync with Google [...]
- Syncing Google Calendar with Entourage 2008 | Blog on a Stick February 11th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
WordPress 2.3.3
Unbelievably stupid that you can’t insert a hyperlink. What were they thinking of???
- tedster February 28th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Safari 523.15 - Mac OS X
I Totally Agree.
- Thomas February 28th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Safari 523.15 - Mac OS X
It was an issue for me with Office 2004 and I can’t believe it hasn’t been addressed!
- Jon March 6th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 - Mac OS X
I hate the way Entourage displays threads, I mean, Conversations. It is completely inferior to the awesome Mail.app thread view (which summarizes data of most recent mail in a thread, or doesn’t display a whole thread at all if there is only one message in it).
- carlivar April 3rd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Safari 525.13 - Mac OS X
Mail.app does do that better than any other email app I’ve come across.
- Thomas April 3rd, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Safari 525.13 - Mac OS X
How did the import from Thunderbird to Entourage go? I found a painful manual process (add “.mbx” to all mailboxes, run script that changes all .mbx files to TEXT files, import into Entourage *1* mailbox at a time).
- Dave April 30th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9 - Mac OS X
Dave. All I did was add .mbx to all my Thunderbird mailboxes and then drug them into Entourage and it all imported. No conversion to text. Additionally, I only lasted in Entourage for a few weeks at the most. Back to Thunderbird.
- Thomas April 30th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Safari 525.18 - Mac OS X
Thanks Thomas.
- Dave May 1st, 2008 at 8:22 am
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9 - Mac OS X