Switching to Mac: Entourage 2008
Posted by mikeg on November 17, 2008
Outlook is (was) an essential tool for communication and one of the core requirements of moving to Mac is to find a suitable email client. My requirement is around connecting to Microsoft Exchange and the only option available is Microsoft Entourage.
I’ve been using it for a few days and while it is no Outlook, it is “workable”. A few things that made i found very useful to help with migration:
- My Outlook was setup in such a way that I had 2 PST files: Archive and Personal. Archive was populated automatically by Outlook Archive functionality to make sure that I do not exceed my quota. Personal was where I kept all the emails that I needed/wanted to keep
- Entourage does not provide built-in functionality for importing PST files (I guess it’s a way for Microsoft to discourage migrating to Mac). There are a number of ways you can find on the internet to achieve this. I decided to pay and it worked out great: Emailchemy offers a tool that imports PST files into RGE (Entourage supported archive format)
- You point to Emailchemy to PST files (multiple if you need to) and it creates RGE file that Entourage is able ti import. Once you import it into Entourage it looks something like this:
From here you just drag the folders where you want them. I moved messages from Deleted Items/Sent Items into appropriate folders to enable Searching.
Note: I saw a mention that Entourage 2008 doesn’t have a size limit, but has a limit on a number of records in the internal database: 1,000,000. Developer explained that most emails generate 2 records, so you are looking at a limit of 500K emails. He also promised that Entourage will worn before you reach that limit.
Other things:
- There is no Archive functionality in Entourage so I am planning to use the following product: ???
- Under Preferences : Mail & News Preferences : Reply & Forward — choose “Place reply at top of message…” under Mail Attribution. This is more inline with how Outlook works
- There is no built-in functionality for “permanent delete” (useful for spam or emails you don’t want to keep), but there is a script that you can add to enable this functionality. Steps are below
How to add “permanent delete” functionality:
http://nik.me/node/90
