The Bottom Line
Pros
- Entourage helps you manage mail with filters, categories, linking of items and calendar integration
- A solid junk mail filter gets rid of a good deal of spam automatically in Entourage
- Entourage comes with superb IMAP support and connects to Exchange servers, too
Cons
- Entourage's user interface is slow and always seems to lag behind what you and Entourage are doing
- Searching messages could be faster in Entourage, and message templates are lacking
- Entourage does not offer learning filters to organize messages automatically
Description
- Entourage connects you with POP, IMAP, Hotmail and Exchange accounts.
- A customizable junk mail filter moves spam to a dedicated folder automatically in Entourage.
- Entourage offers smart folders that automatically aggregate relevant messages using your criteria.
- Powerful filters can do complex tasks automatically, and you can save text snippets for later use.
- Flagging, customizable categories and help you organize
- Next to secure and privacy-conscious HTML support, Entourage also sports stellar plain text editing.
- Entourage integrates email with calendaring, related items can be linked automatically and manually.
- For secure email, Entourage supports S/MIME message signing and encryption.
- Using a step by step wizard, you can archive mail and other Entourage data easily.
- Entourage supports Mac OS X 10.2.8+.
Guide Review - Entourage 2004 11.0.0 - Email Program
Not only can you flag and add categories to messages, you can also build custom views that use these and many more criteria to group relevant messages. Entourage puts flexible and powerful filters at your hand that automatically perform many actions. It is also great how Entourage automatically links messages to their replies or parents. You can manually link any item, too, and Entourage integrates mail with calendaring, its to-do and project tools as well as instant messaging nicely.
Though Entourage supports HTML formatting both when viewing and when editing mail (you can also use Word, and the plain text editing is superb), it does so in a secure and privacy conscious manner, not downloading any remote content automatically.
Tough the junk mail filter built into Entourage does its job and requires no maintenance, it could be more precise. You can connect to Exchange servers using WebDAV, and IMAP support shines in particular with Entourage — including flexible server-side searching. This even works with mail views using searches.
Searching local messages could be a bit faster, though. And, talking about speed, the lack of it when it comes to Entourage's interface is both noticeable, surprising and annoying.
