Here are the top 5 reasons why I dropped Entourage 2008.

1. No Hyperlink Support - You can’t link a few words in emails. This was one that really gets me. I’m always linking phrases to tutorials or additional resources so that people know what I’m talking about.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: This function is not available.
2. No Table Support - Entourage 2008 can read tables, but as soon as you hit reply, the table disappears and you are left with a mess of text. I get a lot of messages with tables in them (copied from Excel and pasted into Outlook) and so I do need to keep the formatting.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Entourage can *display* complex HTML such as tables but it can not *compose* messages with HTML. That’s why when you reply the formatted is gone.
3. No Strikethrough support. - Another basic HTML item that is just not available. You can’t strikeout any text and Entourage can’t read it. When someone sends me a quick update to a webpage, if I can’t see what they want me to remove, I can’t do my job.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Neither bugs nor features. Entourage is simply working as it was designed to work. Its HTML capabilities are limited. Strike-through is not one of its supported text styles.
4. Calendar Syncing is OK - I often had conflicts when I had Entourage automatically syncing to iCal. I’d open up iCal and it’d ask me which even was right; the one in iCal or Entourage? Then, trying to update my Google calendar online was another issue in itself.
5. Not so friendly help. - There is a good community of Microsoft Mac MVPs (MVPs are not Microsoft Employees) over at the official Microsoft site (also syndicated via Google Groups) and their answers are sometimes not so friendly. It made me feel bad just to ask questions.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer:
   (on the subject of inserting links into emails)
   Plain text is the preferred method for emails by people who know the internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any mail client at the other end, doesn’t impose your font, size, style preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by spam filters.

   HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites that will do malicious things. For instance, a spammer can include a link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you’ve read the email and not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP with geolocation servers to assign a location code so that they can then sell your email address to other spammers along with your general location. If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone would block it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to escape spam filters because their messages would have to b simple and without tricks.

   HTML email is wasteful, dangerous, and rude, IMO. It’s just plain evil.

Overall, Entourage 2008 is a decent application. But it’s missing so many small items that eventually, I just got frustrated and moved back to Thunderbird.

Entourage was unable to perform in a business environment for me. If your company never sends, or receives, HTML in emails, than it might work out OK for you. However, I strongly suggest checking out Thunderbird. It is an excellent email application and I’m very happy to be using it again!

Things I love:

• Projects - Projects are cool in the fact that I can group emails together, file them away, yet have easy access to them. I need to dig into this more and use it.
• Full Calendar Support - No more Outlook meeting request issues or confusion. This was a big factor in changing to Entourage at work.
• Notes & Checklist built in. Handy.
• Mac look and feel. I do think it looks pretty.
• Little Growl like email and calendar notifications.
• The day planner window is nice. Kind of in the way, but you get use to it.
• It auto corrects some of my spelling mistakes. That’s quite handy.
• It saves folders as mbox files which makes easy import/export with Mail.app or Thunderbird. Moving everything over was slick. Moving back would be just as easy.
• It links emails replies to the orgional message so I don’t have to go search for them if I want to know what I said.

Things that make me go What the @+#!

• No ability to add clickable links on text to an email message. You can’t highlight any text and and a link to it. You can only drop in a URL and let the other email client automatically link it. This is really bugging me. See the heated discussion.
• When I get links in emails Entourage often picks up the next word in the sentence so I have to manually edit quite a few links I click on.
  Example: http://www.apple.comApple
• Calendar syncing to iCal works great, but Entourage’s calendar files contain information that iCal or Google Calendar doesn’t understand. They then cause issues if trying to export from iCal and import into anything else. Or, I get sync issues and end up loosing half my dates. If there are event sync issues, never fix all of them at once. Do it one by one.
• Syncing up with Google is another issue in itself.
• No way to delete people from the ‘collected address’. Entourage adds everyone you ever emailed, or got email from, to some ‘collected address’ address book and doesn’t allow you to delete them.
• If I have text selected when I hit reply, it only puts that selected text as the quoted message. Personally, I want the entire message every time. At least Apple Mail has a checkbox where I can enable that functionality.
• No grammar check. I really thought I’d have this as I thought Entourage an Word were like BFFs.
• When importing email, it auto accepted all my old meeting requests and then notified me. Not a huge deal I guess, but annoying none the less.

Overall, Entourage 2008 isn’t horrible, but it isn’t fantastic. It’s not Outlook for the Mac, but it’s closer than anything else. For every positive there is a flaw and if there were any other solution that worked flawlessly with Outlook calendar notifications, I’d consider switching away. Ok, I’ll admit, 10.5’s Mail.app is pretty good, but I don’t have 10.5 at work.

Background. This is my first experience with Entourage. I recently used Apple Mail and then Thunderbird 2. My computer is a MacBook Pro with 10.4.x on it.

I tried using Plaxo, but they sync to your main Google calendar and not any others. This may work well if you only have one Google calendar to sync with, but that wasn’t my case.

I thought about some of the tools like Spanning Sync and gSync but Spanning says it doesn’t work right with Entourage and gSync doesn’t say anything. You’d think that since Entourage syncs with iCal, that it wouldn’t be that hard.

So I’ve come up with two work arounds.

1. Update my Google Calendar manually with my Entourage 2008 events. Manual I know, but it works.
2. Use Sunbird and Provider to sync to the Google calendar to my desktop. Then, once a week or so, select all events in my Sunbird calendar, delete them and import the ics file I export from iCal. This is almost a good solution. Still a bit manual, but you can do multiple calendar events at the same time. The downside here is that Entourage creates items in the ics file that Google and Sunbird don’t understand which cause the import to fail. Google Calendar gives me a error and line number though so I just search for the issue in the ics file and manually fix it.

The conclusion? Nothing that I’ve found automatically syncs well.

I haven’t tried GCALDaemon yet though. It may be a solution. If you try it, let me know. If you find other solutions, I’m all ears!

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.