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I've been using Entourage 2004/2008 for many years for my business. About 12 accounts, many categories and client folders, filtering rules, etc. My entire business' history, organized and searchable, is in that database. (I am currently doing mail on a mid-2012 MBP on Yosemite, not my studio machine).

The other day I began to have problems where Entourage would freeze after a download; after a force quit and restart, the new emails would be there but nothing filtered, and manually running rules was now ineffective. Research showed this was likely due to corruption of the identity, which was confirmed by running a few tests. Recommendation was to export my identity and re-import into a new one.

In order to get away from the issues of having all of my emails into such a massive database (4.7GB covered all emails since 2009 and several important categories going back to 2001- I used Eudora before that) I thought it would be a good idea to move to a more modern client that avoided the fact that Entourage's database scheme made it Time-machine incompatible, and began looking at Outlook and Apple Mail, both of which store emails in individual files.

Outlook 2011 works, but is cluttered (I don't use the calendaring, scheduling, etc. features) and omits several features that were very convenient in Entourage:

-no provision for "After sending, move email to folder X" which allowed me to keep important correspondence in the same folder as that client's incoming emails without having to keep all trivial sent mail forever. This option is very important to my workflow; smart threading in Mail or "sort by conversation" in Outlook helps but require you to keep every "let's have lunch next Thursday" email you send out forever in the Sent folder

-omission of the option to not include an account in the Send & Receive schedule. This was very useful as several of my accounts really represent aliases of my main email account on my server (such accounts being set up with the same login info as the main), allowing me to easily reply from "different" addresses. If I set up those accounts in Outlook, it checks the same account multiple times causing either multiple downloads, a cluttered inbox structure and error messages which aren't really errors but are actually the result of my admittedly convoluted account setup).

Apple's Mail also works, but I am constantly hearing about issues with Mail from this forum and others, especially if the setup has many rules, folders, etc. I'm also worried about Apple's current business model which makes major changes to such important applications rather willy-nilly and forces you to accept them with each system update.

Operationally, I also do not see in Mail an "After sending, move email to folder X" option. .

So the question becomes:

Do I make a new identity in Entourage 2008 and continue to use it? (Seems it's only a matter of time before system updates make it useless)

Do I move into Outlook or Mail and manually move every important email as I send them so I can empty out my Sent folder regularly?

Is there a way to deal with the lack of a "do not include account in the Send & Receive schedule" in Outlook?

Are my concerns about Apple Mail valid or paranoiac?

Is there another third party option that will satisfy all the needs I've described:

• multiple accounts with the option to not include an account in the send/receive schedule;
• the ability to move a new email to a specific folder after sending
• architecture based on individual files and not a huge database

Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate the very helpful input I get from you guys at this forum!

Way too uptown for me, dude. I found this link. I always thought Thunderbird was just a fine wine...


http://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-entourage/

Do you know offhand if Thunderbird can do the "big three" I've listed at the end?

I don't. BTW, check out Drennon's post on FB just now. Sad news.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I don't. BTW, check out Drennon's post on FB just now. Sad news.

Yes, seeing this news from my many comic friends. Sad. Jimmy has faced his health problems for years with stoicism and humor and was an inspiration. He was also hilarious.

I moved from Outlook to Mail long ago, and never looked back (it imported all my email without problems).

Mail has worked fine for me, and the latest version has some good new features.
I also use a lot of aliases from my main email accounts, and it handles them just fine. with no clutter. Add to this the seamless sync with your iPhone, and it's a no brainer.

If you want the added functionality of having OUT rules (as opposed to the IN-only rules from Mail), so your emails are moved to other folders automatically as they are sent and/or received, you can buy Indev's Mail Act-on, and that will give you that functionality.
They even have a few more add-ons like this to control other aspects for yet more power and features (tagging, etc).

I used Mail Act-on and it always worked great with Mail. I haven't updated it yet because I didn't want to pay for the update, so I just wrote a few Applescripts to handle this instead (still working on them).

http://www.indev.ca

Apple-scripting works great as well.

FMiguelez wrote:If you want the added functionality of having OUT rules (as opposed to the IN-only rules from Mail), so your emails are moved to other folders automatically as they are sent and/or received, you can buy Indev's Mail Act-on, and that will give you that functionality.

Thanks, that could be the ticket. Will Act-On let you select a destination folder for individual emails, or must the function be generalized as rules (based on, say, the recipient address)? The former would be preferable.

IIRC, it was mostly the latter, with rules, but it could be that I didn't really delve into the app.
Maybe you should ask them, and you'll get to see if their support is any good.

I do remember you can also quickly move emails in bulk. You select a bunch of them and press a key command. You can have them go to a favourites folder or type the few first letters of one if it's buried in a nested folder structure.

I just saw you get a 30-day free trial for their products, so you should probably download and check them out in a real life situation.

Apple mail is great. I monitor more than 20 email addresses with not problem. One on the great features is its so easy to get to view Raw source of email to identify phishing and scams. The most needed feature is being able to search in the rules window. Having over 100 rules they can get hard to find when adjustments are needed. Making html signatures are pretty easy, it would have been nice if Apple would give the signature file a name that's straight forward to recognize.

Using Apple Script to do custom treatment of emails is great.

I highly recommend getting SpamSieve as better spam filter than the build in junk filter.
http://c-command.com/spamsieve/

I've always has success with Apple Mail. I have about 10K messages in various on and off line mailboxes and never lost anything. I have messages going back to Eudora and Claris, including some from Entourage, Outlook, and all the versions of Apple Mail. Some of the Eudora and Claris messages don't display in mail and need to be opened in a web browser, but the rest are fine.

The instances where I know people have problems appear to come down to the ISPs mail services. For example one major ISP in Canada repackages Yahoo mail and that seems to create problems. I use a domain hosting service that has bog standard Unix mail services and that has never failed with Apple Mail. So I guess if Mail works with your ISP, it works.

As for the features: I expect you can use a Smart Mailbox to get your sent messages into specific folders. Presumably, you have Mail and could try it. Individual mail files appear on my systems, although there are other files that are used to index them in Mail. I can highlight specific messages in Library > Mail folders, and use spacebar to preview them. They are .emlx files which may be specific to Apple, but you can open them in a text editor. There is an account preference to automatically include it in automatic checks for new messages.

As for Apple changing things, the only change in Mail that I thought was material is when they dumped RSS. Getting Mail and RSS all in one place was great and I wish they'd put it back in.

FMiguelez wrote:IIRC, it was mostly the latter, with rules, but it could be that I didn't really delve into the app.
Maybe you should ask them, and you'll get to see if their support is any good.

Looks like it will handle things both ways- I can set up rules for frequent clients, and do it on a per-email basis when necessary.

Basstrup wrote:The most needed feature is being able to search in the rules window. Having over 100 rules they can get hard to find when adjustments are needed.

I highly recommend getting SpamSieve as better spam filter than the build in junk filter.
http://c-command.com/spamsieve/

That is a great feature, always missed that in Entourage. And I've been using SpamSieve for many years.

When my email went to hell three weeks ago, the culprit turned out to be that Yahoo Bizmail is no longer supporting POP. They don't outright say it but keep telling me that I better not be disappointed if they never "fix" it.

I dislike IMAP on my main computer and now that I've been forced into it really hate it. Am now exploring other hosts for my domain. Yahoo! has always sucked but I've been able to make it work so I stayed with them. This is a deal breaker. $136 a year for this? No thanks!

I'm ok with the Apple Mail client but don't love it. Finding something better is on my 'get around to it' list and has been for years.

mikehalloran wrote:I'm ok with the Apple Mail client but don't love it. Finding something better is on my 'get around to it' list and has been for years.

Same here but there never seems to be anything that much better. What's the problem with IMAP?