[Andrew Stephens]

I used to use Tiger mail but switched to Entourage. No I'm Leoparded up I'm wondering if the addition of data recognition and to do's etc make it worth swapping back to mail.

Any thoughts?

[eggman]

I just switched to Apple Mail having used Entourage for years and years and years. I had contemplated the move during the transition to Tiger, when Spotlight wouldn't index Entourage mail, but would index Apple Mail... but MS indicated they would (and did, in fact) fix that... although I must admit that I'm not seeing mail messages coming up in my Spotlight searches anymore... at all, Entourage OR Mail.

In any case, what motivated me was the knowledge that my 3GB+ email database was going to be archived anew with every single Time Machine backup. That's significant storage. And I'd always been leery of the "one freaking huge file" approach to storing all my email messages.

After a mysterious problem that was blocking me from importing my mailboxes from Entourage vanished after a reboot (after disabling Path Finder, BTW)... I've been appreciating Mail, and missing fewer of the Entourage features than I might have guessed.

These were the big deals for me in making the transition:

First: all imported mail messages were marked "unread" at first. That seems just wrong to me... and it did take time to select my many folders and "Mark All As Read" - which does take time for tens of thousands of messages!

Second: I had dozens of Rules for shunting mail from my Inbox to appropriate folders for clients, and a variety of persons and organizations that I want to keep sorted. That took some time to reassemble in Mail.

Right out of the box, Entourage's Junk Mail filtering appears better than Mail's... but Entourage's Junk Mail filter doesn't "learn" (yes, I know there are scripts for that...) and Mail is clearly learning as I go, even over a few days the difference is noticeable. I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out in the long run, but I was seeing a lot of Junk get through Entourage's filter.

I look forward to hearing if anyone else is going down this path. I never cared for Entourage's UI, but it was feature rich. With time, Mail has grown, and Entourage's bloat has grown increasingly tiresome for me. And as a graphic designer with dozens and dozens of fonts, I especially despised the fact that the Font selector in Entourage was one massive drop-down list... and was unresponsive to keystrokes to get you into the neighborhood of the font you wanted. Good UI is scalable...

[Andrew Stephens]

firing up mail I have been left with a mailbox called import. I can't seem to get my imported mail folders out of this folder. I don't really want them to be nested inside the import folder but under the main inbox icon. Doesn't seem an easy way to do this.

[eggman]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

firing up mail I have been left with a mailbox called import. I can't seem to get my imported mail folders out of this folder. I don't really want them to be nested inside the import folder but under the main inbox icon. Doesn't seem an easy way to do this.

Hmm... I was able to easily drag and drop those folders out of the Import folder.

[eggman]

Oh, wait...

If by "under" the inbox icon, you mean nested within it... that doesn't work. But they ought to go anywhere within the "ON MY MAC" section of the sidebar.

[Andrew Stephens]

As you can see I have some mail boxes at the top, but al the folders are nested inside the import folder and I can't get them out!

Overall although it looks nice Mail still doesn't seem to exude entourages sense of solidity and reliability, plus I just tried to mail an 8 Mb presentation from mail which insisted that the file was too big to send, Entourage managed it just fine.

I think mail has some work cut out to convince me at the moment.

[peeb]

Mail whips Entourage senseless, except for Exchange compatibility.

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by peeb 

Mail whips Entourage senseless, except for Exchange compatibility.

except that I have a general folder that entourage moves all non filtered mail into, which mail can't seem to do. Plus I can't seem to get it to set up how `i want it, which entourage seems to be able to do, plus the reason for the import 2 folder is that all my wonderwalls mail from the first import spontaneously dissappeared!


I'd rather use mail than entourage, just like I'd like to switch back from Firefox to Safari, but I'm not sure apples apps are best in class yet.

[peeb]

Fine, if you prefer one over the other - it's not clear to me that your problems are not caused by glitches transferring your mail, but if Entourage works for you, go for it.

[mjankor]

I think you should have a look at Apple's rules. They may well be able to do what you're after.

Strange you couldn't send an 8MB file from Mail. I often send documents up to 20MB from Mail.

[Cold Warrior]

Mail doesn't let you set different column choices for different folders. If I want the From column in my Inbox, but not the To column, and vice versa in my Sent folder, I can't do that. Mail makes the columns the same for Inbox and Sent. Dumb. Also, it tags replies with 'on [date] at [time] so-and-so wrote:' Only with forwards does it give the To, From, Subject, and Date lines. Lame.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

except that I have a general folder that entourage moves all non filtered mail into, which mail can't seem to do.

Assuming I understand what you mean (I could be wrong), this is trivially easy in Mail. Perferences -> Rules. Create a new rule, and make sure it is the last one evaluated (ie, after all other rules have been performed).

"If [any] of the following conditions are met:
[Every Message]
Perform the following actions:
[Move Message] to mailbox: [General]"

I use just such a rule to "beep" at me every time I get an email that's not filtered into another mailbox by any of the other rules.

Having said that... I don't really understand why you'd want to use such a rule to move mail. That's what the "IN" box is for, after all. But everyone uses things differently, I guess.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

firing up mail I have been left with a mailbox called import. I can't seem to get my imported mail folders out of this folder. I don't really want them to be nested inside the import folder but under the main inbox icon. Doesn't seem an easy way to do this.

Where in the list are you trying to drag them to? You will only be able to drag them to the user configurable part of the list (ie, below the 'Junk' folder). Try dragging to between 'Junk' and 'Import'. Mail also likes to keep things sorted alphabetically (not always Ideal), so if the folder you're trying to drag starts with something alphabetically greater than "import" then you'll probably need to drag it to the end of the list. This behaviour is a bit silly.

You cannot drag them to be nested in the INBOX (at least not with POP accounts).

[Brass]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Mail doesn't let you set different column choices for different folders. If I want the From column in my Inbox, but not the To column, and vice versa in my Sent folder, I can't do that. Mail makes the columns the same for Inbox and Sent. Dumb. Also, it tags replies with 'on [date] at [time] so-and-so wrote:' Only with forwards does it give the To, From, Subject, and Date lines. Lame.

This is my only significant problem with Mail, really dopey! But not enough to stop me using it as my preferred mailer.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

Overall although it looks nice Mail still doesn't seem to exude entourages sense of solidity and reliability, plus I just tried to mail an 8 Mb presentation from mail which insisted that the file was too big to send, Entourage managed it just fine.

Entourage solid and reliable? You've got to be joking. I used to use Entourage and switched to Mail.app back in 10.1 after Entourage corrupted my database twice.

I work in Macintosh IT and Entourage has to be the worst email app I've ever seen. I must have deal with Entourage issues 30 times a week, usually a bad message list. I never hear a peep from the Mail.app users.

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by Brass 

Where in the list are you trying to drag them to? You will only be able to drag them to the user configurable part of the list (ie, below the 'Junk' folder). Try dragging to between 'Junk' and 'Import'. Mail also likes to keep things sorted alphabetically (not always Ideal), so if the folder you're trying to drag starts with something alphabetically greater than "import" then you'll probably need to drag it to the end of the list. This behaviour is a bit silly.

You cannot drag them to be nested in the INBOX (at least not with POP accounts).

Basically all I want is the folder list OUT of the folder "Import" and underneath the Junk folder, but I can't seem to do it. Then I can delete the Import folder and keep things clean.

Don't really like the main account/inbox folders at the top but I guess these are hard coded. Would rather be able to either hide these and just show mail in the assigned folder OR have the relevant sub folders underneath (inside) each main account inbox.

[Andrew Stephens]

double post

[Andrew Stephens]

also...

I had a small logo in my company sig in entourage. Can't seem to work out how to do this in Mail. Given it's extensive support for html in email I can't believe you cannot ad a graphic in a sig.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

also...

I had a small logo in my company sig in entourage. Can't seem to work out how to do this in Mail. Given it's extensive support for html in email I can't believe you cannot ad a graphic in a sig.

Very simple:

Create your signature in the Mail settings.
(To add an image to the signature, do the obvious: Just drag and drop it into the signature.)

Your signature is now saved under "All signatures".

Drag and drop the new signature to all accounts on the left-hand side you want it to be available for.

When you create a new mail using one of the accounts you dragged the sig file to, the sig will be available and show up with any included inline graphics.

[Andrew Stephens]

I would also like my rule to work. I'm not daft but I can't get them to work as expected.

if any mail contains @xxxxxxxxxx move to folder xxxxxxxx

simple enough.
Nope

sitting in the main inbox.

Junk

if junk move to junk and mark as read.

nope sat in junk marked as unready


flakey flakey flakey

[Andrew Stephens]

right this is getting stupid!!!

It IS sorting the mail but keeping a duplicate in the main mailbox (these are not smart folders but real folders. It's marking the sorted files as read!

It appears that everytime I run a rule it is COPYING a file to the required folder. I now have 10 versions of the same mail message in the reuqired folder AND the original in the main inbox. Stupid!

AND if I delete them, it puts them back in again!

AND it seems to now be sorting mails almost randomly. Messages that are not sorted display fine while messages that have been sorted have had all the content stripped out and are blank. The dock icon is constantly displaying one mail as unread but all mails are displayed as read in the application. This is getting very frustrating.

AND it keeps setting random messages from clients as junk while others in the same folder are marked as not junk. If I mark them as not junk it changes them, and then changes them back again.

I'm thinking my install screwed up somehow as this is beyond buggy

[analogika]

Try telling it to rebuild its mailboxes.

[peeb]

I think reinstalling or rebuilding would help - those problems are not normal.

[driven]

Regarding the "one freaking huge file" for the e-mail..... I don't think Entourage is any different from Outlook's .PST files in this regard, is it?

[peeb]

No, both suck in that sense. Both will continue to build massive .pst files which eventually implode.

[eggman]

Originally Posted by driven 

Regarding the "one freaking huge file" for the e-mail..... I don't think Entourage is any different from Outlook's .PST files in this regard, is it?

No, but Outlook isn't an eidolon of exemplary behavior now, is it?

[joegomolski]

I just moved my mailboxes from the import folder.

As I moved each folder I dragged it to the "On My Mac" folder.

And the import folder was then deleted

[Andrew Stephens]

I don't HAVE an "On my Mac folder"!!!

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by eggman 

I just switched to Apple Mail having used Entourage for years and years and years. I had contemplated the move during the transition to Tiger, when Spotlight wouldn't index Entourage mail, but would index Apple Mail... but MS indicated they would (and did, in fact) fix that... although I must admit that I'm not seeing mail messages coming up in my Spotlight searches anymore... at all, Entourage OR Mail.

In any case, what motivated me was the knowledge that my 3GB+ email database was going to be archived anew with every single Time Machine backup. That's significant storage. And I'd always been leery of the "one freaking huge file" approach to storing all my email messages.

After a mysterious problem that was blocking me from importing my mailboxes from Entourage vanished after a reboot (after disabling Path Finder, BTW)... I've been appreciating Mail, and missing fewer of the Entourage features than I might have guessed.

These were the big deals for me in making the transition:

First: all imported mail messages were marked "unread" at first. That seems just wrong to me... and it did take time to select my many folders and "Mark All As Read" - which does take time for tens of thousands of messages!

Second: I had dozens of Rules for shunting mail from my Inbox to appropriate folders for clients, and a variety of persons and organizations that I want to keep sorted. That took some time to reassemble in Mail.

Right out of the box, Entourage's Junk Mail filtering appears better than Mail's... but Entourage's Junk Mail filter doesn't "learn" (yes, I know there are scripts for that...) and Mail is clearly learning as I go, even over a few days the difference is noticeable. I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out in the long run, but I was seeing a lot of Junk get through Entourage's filter.

I look forward to hearing if anyone else is going down this path. I never cared for Entourage's UI, but it was feature rich. With time, Mail has grown, and Entourage's bloat has grown increasingly tiresome for me. And as a graphic designer with dozens and dozens of fonts, I especially despised the fact that the Font selector in Entourage was one massive drop-down list... and was unresponsive to keystrokes to get you into the neighborhood of the font you wanted. Good UI is scalable...

Were you trying to import messages from a POP account? If so, POP is a very dumb, brain dead protocol. It knows nothing of message flags or even folders. If you were leaving a copy of messages on your POP server, this would explain the message flags.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by eggman 

Oh, wait...

If by "under" the inbox icon, you mean nested within it... that doesn't work. But they ought to go anywhere within the "ON MY MAC" section of the sidebar.

But if you do this, the messages will live in your machine and not on the server. If you have an IMAP account, this is not a good idea. It makes these messages inaccessible from anywhere else, and means that you are responsible for backing up these messages - they are on your machine only.

The correct IMAP behavior is for personal folders to be subfolders of your Inbox, this is the standard. However, if for some reason you really don't like this, you can set your IMAP path prefix to "INBOX" in your mail account prefs, and this will display these folders separately, rather than being a child of INBOX.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by mjankor 

I think you should have a look at Apple's rules. They may well be able to do what you're after.

Strange you couldn't send an 8MB file from Mail. I often send documents up to 20MB from Mail.

These limits have nothing to do with the client but the SMTP server. If one client permits you to send larger files it is because it segments large files into smaller pieces. The receiving SMTP server also has to be configured to accept files of that size.

Email is simply not a good way to send large files.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Entourage solid and reliable? You've got to be joking. I used to use Entourage and switched to Mail.app back in 10.1 after Entourage corrupted my database twice.

I work in Macintosh IT and Entourage has to be the worst email app I've ever seen. I must have deal with Entourage issues 30 times a week, usually a bad message list. I never hear a peep from the Mail.app users.

I agree. I work on email servers all day, and I can ensure you guys that Entourage really sucks hard.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

Basically all I want is the folder list OUT of the folder "Import" and underneath the Junk folder, but I can't seem to do it. Then I can delete the Import folder and keep things clean.

Don't really like the main account/inbox folders at the top but I guess these are hard coded. Would rather be able to either hide these and just show mail in the assigned folder OR have the relevant sub folders underneath (inside) each main account inbox.

Before proceeding, why not starting by specifying whether you are using POP or IMAP accounts? It will make a difference here. You cannot upload messages to POP accounts, you would have to create a local folder to dump these messages into.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by analogika 

Try telling it to rebuild its mailboxes.

This will only work with an IMAP account. To my knowledge, he hasn't specified what account type he is working with.

[Andrew Stephens]

Hi thanks for the helps chaps.


All the accounts are POP. I have set each account to delete mail from the server once downloaded, however this does not always seem to happen.

Bizarrely some of the rules work, some of the time. Nothing seems consistent at all.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

Hi thanks for the helps chaps.


All the accounts are POP. I have set each account to delete mail from the server once downloaded, however this does not always seem to happen.

Bizarrely some of the rules work, some of the time. Nothing seems consistent at all.

Okay, then dragging messages to Inboxes and such won't help. No offense to many people here, but I think there is confusion regarding the basic differences between POP and IMAP which is adding to a lot of confusion here.

Here is what you need to do:

Go to your Mailbox menu, New Mailbox, create a new mailbox. This will create a local mailbox (which is really just a folder.. for some reason OS X insists on calling them "mailboxes" - just a terminology difference. For others following along: my educated guess is that this won't create an "On My Mac" folder, because with POP *everything* is on your Mac). Once you have this new folder, dump your messages into this folder and recreate your folder structure as you had it. Obviously Mail had a hard time recreating your folder structure, which is not really Mail's fault because Microsoft uses a proprietary mail store.

Once you have done this and are settled in, get rid of your POP accounts as soon as you can and replace them with IMAP accounts. POP is a really archaic and frustrating protocol, I despise it. If your account was setup as an IMAP account, this migration would have taken all of one minute - literally. The only waiting time would be in sucking in mail from the server for offline viewing (OS X Mail refers to this as "caching", which it uses not only for offline viewing, but also for making these messages indexable in Spotlight).

Hope this helps.

[driven]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I agree. I work on email servers all day, and I can ensure you guys that Entourage really sucks hard.

In what ways? Please elaborate.

[Andrew Stephens]

Thanks for the tip Besson

however my mailbox folders are currently inside the folder import. Your suggestion will simply result in them being inside a new folder. I wanted the mailbox folders out of the import folder and into the sidebar, which they should do as they are just folders.

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by analogika 

Very simple:

Create your signature in the Mail settings.
(To add an image to the signature, do the obvious: Just drag and drop it into the signature.)

Your signature is now saved under "All signatures".

Drag and drop the new signature to all accounts on the left-hand side you want it to be available for.

When you create a new mail using one of the accounts you dragged the sig file to, the sig will be available and show up with any included inline graphics.

That's exactly what I did, however when I drag the graphic into the sig, it just pops back out again.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by driven 

In what ways? Please elaborate.

Well, we'll leave Entourage's Exchange "support" out of my list for now, since that subject deserves more attention and may not be of interest to you, but...

Like goMac said, your entire mail store is stored in a single file/database (as it is on an Exchange server). These large files are prone to corruption, a pain in the ass to backup, and difficult to index for searching outside of Microsoft land (does Spotlight support Entourage?! If so, Microsoft must have done a favor for Apple). There are no Unix tools for searching for and manipulating Entourage mail stores.

Secondly, it wasn't until Entourage 2004 that Entourage supported TLS authentication, making it an absolute pain in the ass for administrators since it and Outlook Express were the only mail clients left in the world that didn't and therefore needed their own service running just for them.

I have a laundry list of little interface critiques for it too, but it's been a while since I used Entourage. I would have to refresh my memory to hash out these arguments... my arguments in this post pertain to Entourage's general design.

If you want more arguments, you can also look at my "advanced email client shootout" thread and see how Entourage does there. It's been a while, but I'm sure that Entourage is missing many useful features common among other mail clients too.

Philosophically, I find it a generally bad idea to keep mail locked up in a proprietary mail store produced by a vendor that has taken great pains to make life difficult for others in keeping their systems proprietary in a world that outside of Microsoft land is built off of open standards. For instance, Hotmail. Why on Earth would Hotmail be based on a proprietary mail store when:

a) They could just use Exchange on the backend (Microsoft doesn't, Hotmail does not support hierarchical folders while Exchange does)

b) Everything they want to do has already been done with IMAP. Why reinvent the wheel?

I have no idea how difficult it is to get mail out of the Entourage mail store (judging by Andrew's experiences, it sounds like it is less than perfect), and I refuse to be locked into a badly designed email app's mail store.

Granted, Apple ditched using the open standard mbox for something like Maildir except also supplemented by something Apple wrote to support Spotlight, but at least I can browse through these individual messages in a Unix shell and access them - they are just plain text files, not the goofy little database that Microsoft email programs are stored in.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

Thanks for the tip Besson

however my mailbox folders are currently inside the folder import. Your suggestion will simply result in them being inside a new folder. I wanted the mailbox folders out of the import folder and into the sidebar, which they should do as they are just folders.

If you create a new mailbox you should have the option of placing it outside of the "Import" folder parent. Have you tried this yet?

[Andrew Stephens]

I really don't know.

Suddenly an On my Mac folder has appeared. If I drag a folder to it then it works, huzzah. The the folder disapears. Then when I get mail a new import folder appears, but the mail has no content, unless I rebuild the mailbox, then all NEW imported mail appears.

So I send atest mail to one of my mail accounts, and anothe folder called meme mail appears with a wonderwalls mailbox inside it.

And then the content of the mail dissapears.

So I quit mail and restart it, and all mail shows up as unread, until I click on a mailbox, when it switches to read, but the content vanishes again.

Do I hear a vote for a fresh install? And if so should I do just mail (how?) or the whole OS

Also weirdly I just misspelt disappears, and the spell checker suggests the most likely replacement as "cheescake". WTF

[Andrew Stephens]

ALSO...

everytime I click on a different mail folder, the bloody thing has reset itself to show latest mail at the bottom rather than the top, no matter how many times I click the arrow to reverse the order!!!

[besson3c]

No, do not reinstall your entire OS, this is overkill and there are no guarantees there anyway.

What happens when you try setting up your account in another OS X account without importing any of your existing mail? Does it work properly there?

[Timothy Maxwell]

Try SpamSieve. You will really like it.

[Andrew Stephens]

And now, it won't make any new mailbox folders. If I go to make new mailbox it lets me name one but then it never shows up in the list.

and it's started duplicating my wonderwalls mail in both the old andrew@ mailbox, the one it insists on recreating AND the main wonderwalls inbox

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

That's exactly what I did, however when I drag the graphic into the sig, it just pops back out again.

Your system is seriously ****ed up.

Are you running from an admin account? How did you upgrade? Did you just copy your stuff onto another drive and then back? Did you leave it where it was and just upgrade?

[Andrew Stephens]

Yup running from Admin account.

Backed everything up to my external drive and made a clone copy.

Might have to try a fresh install.

[Andrew Stephens]

So I've reinstalled mail and tried again.

After four or five imports I've managed to get mail to see and import all my mailboxes. After the first one I had a section on the sidebar "on my mac" now it's gone! And I cna't arage my folders into it, just like the first time, because it's gone. A sidebar section "Mail Activity" has appeared from nowhere and I can't get rid of it.

and none of my rules work (again)

I think the only sensible option is to stick with Entourage until a mail update arrives to fix this whole sorry mess.

[analogika]

"Mail activity" doesn't appear "from nowhere" - it shows up when you click the little square/triangle icon at the bottom (the same one that shows covers in iTunes).

I'm thinking a fresh install and using Migration Assistant to restore your stuff from the external drive might be a better idea. It sounds vaguely like your home folder permissions are majorly messed up...