Since getting my Macbook, I have switched to using POP3 instead of the GMail web interface for my e-mail. I like the fact that I have all my e-mail on my laptop with me wherever I go. I still use GMail hosting for its excellent spam filters and save a copy of all e-mail there as a backup. Of course, not using a web interface for my e-mail meant that that I needed an e-mail application on my laptop, and thus began the search.

Why not Apple Mail?

When I first got my Macbook, I started using Apple Mail. There were a few things that I did not like:

• Mail does not perform well once there are a few hundred emails in a folder.
• I had some problems getting signatures to associate correctly with accounts.
• It stores email in a proprietary emlx format, which then requires a special converter to export your email.

Why not Thunderbird?

On my previous systems (either Windows or Linux), I always used Mozilla Thunderbird. It is open-source and very well supported, and one cannot really argue about its price. Furthermore, it is really easy to get data in and out of Thunderbird. Unfortunately, Thunderbird on the Mac behaves much like ... Thunderbird on Windows. In order to be truly cross-platform, it does not use basic OS X facilities like Spotlight and Address Book. This failure to use OS-native facilities also applies to Mozilla Firefox, but I still use Firefox for its excellent collection of extensions.

Why Entourage?

For a little over a month, I have been using Microsoft Entourage as my primary e-mail application. For those of you who have never used a Mac, Entourage is the Microsoft Office for Mac equivalent of Outlook. As far as I know, Entourage uses a completely separate codebase, and there are certainly feature disparities between it and Outlook.

The best part of Entourage is that it is a true Macintosh application. It inserts entries into the Spotlight database, making finding emails very easy. You can also use Applescript to automate frequently used tasks, and very easily bind them to a keyboard shortcut (more on that in a second). You can set it up to sync with iCal and/or Address Book, which is useful if you use iSync.

Entourage is not perfect by any means. It is a behemoth of an application and it stores data in a proprietary database format, much like Outlook. What is different is the ease with which you can import and export data. Want to export a folder of e-mails as an mbox file? Just drag and drop the folder to a Finder window. Want to do the reverse? Drag and drop works for that too!

Entourage is still not a Universal Binary, but that should be fixed later this year in the new version of Microsoft Office. For now, it runs fine through Rosetta, and is generally more responsive than its Office brethren Word and Excel. Perhaps that is what not being encumbered by a legacy codebase does for you.

A new filing system

Thanks to Spotlight's excellent search capabilities and Entourage's Applescript integration, I have done away with the complex hierarchy of folders I was using to save my e-mail. Inspired by Sharon Sarmiento's 7 Ways to Tame Your Inbox, I now have just three: Inbox, Sent and Archive. All new e-mail arrives in the Inbox and either gets deleted, move immediately to the Archive folder, or gets moved after I have performed some action on it. So, my Inbox generally has all new e-mail plus old messages that I need to act on. All other e-mail that I want to retain is in the Archive folder. I also have an Applescript set up to use Ctrl-A to move messages to the Archive folder (for you Windows folks, Apple-A is what does Select All on a Mac). This minimalist approach saves me time both while filing away e-mails and while searching for them, since I no longer have to decide where something goes and then remember what decisions I made in the past.