Free time is not always a good thing. When I have too much of it I start to think about what I can do to pass the time. Since Microsoft had just released an update Microsoft Office 2004 for OS X I decided to switch over to entourage for my email to see how well it works. I had no problems importing all of my accounts, messages, rules, and signatures, so I really didn’t have that much to do. Everything worked very well and I was up and running in around 15 minutes.

There was nothing wrong with Apple’s Mail program at all. I was just bored and curious so I felt like changing. I like how entourage now supports OS X sync services so my address book and calendar are now in sync with everything else I sync with. It’s nice have the calendar integrated in the with the mail client since I am used to Outlook at work, but I still think iCal is a little better for me because you can have multiple calendars and publish and subscribe to other public calendars as well. The only weakness I see with the entourage syncing is that it can only sync with one calendar in iCal, and that calendar is a new one listed as entourage in the iCal interface. So if you have a bunch of calendars in iCal you have to switch their items over to the entourage calendar for them to automatically sync with the entourage calendar. This is simple enough to do but takes away from the reason for having multiple calendars in the first place. Entourage now supports spotlight search but I have not had a chance to play with that yet.

Other than that entourage seems like a very nice mail client. All of my rules are working perfectly and email is flowing with no issues to report. I’ll stay with it until the next time I get bored – probably when leopard ships and Apple improves mail again.