Yes indeed.
This Entourage is quite a piece of software, not that I'm an expert judge of
such matters, but anyway, I am quite impressed. Being a Japanese-English
translator living in Japan, I was blown away in particular by the unexpected
support for Japanese-formatted contact info in the address book (after
registering E'rage as Japanese with the Language Register).
But as I'm sure the developers realize, those of us who come from a
Eudora-using background have to do some adjusting. In many ways, of course,
E'rage is slicker/better/prettier etc. Otherwise those of us who have made
the switch would still be using Eudora, right? But I will say that in a some
important ways the Eudora approach does seem superior. These points have
probably been raised before, but allow me to go on the record about two
things, attachments and mailboxes.
Attachments: It was only yesterday, after about a month of regular use, that
I fully (?) grasped the attachment situation, namely, that *every
attachment*, sent or received, was staying embedded in my Messages file
unless I took action to delete it (or the message to which it was attached).
I've belatedly gone through and chucked the many megabytes of embedded
attachments, and I've created a rule to automatically delete attachments
from outgoing messages once they're sent. But I'm sorry that attachments
can't reside outside the Messages file, because it's handy to be able to go
back to a message later and be able to click on the attachment icon, which
one can do in Eudora unless the attachment itself has been deleted or lost.
(And meanwhile, I wonder how many other Eudora habitues have been letting
their Messages file bulge to the bursting point because they're not
conscious of the need to prune out those attachments.)
Mailboxes: It's really neat to be able to archive a mailbox by dragging it
to the desktop. And I see that the process can be reversed: you can drag an
archive into the E'rage folder list, and presto, it's a mailbox again. Yes,
but it's much nicer to be able to manipulate mailboxes directly in the
Finder--and to have messages split up between multiple files, which is of
course another facet of the same feature. I still only have a month's worth
of mail, but after a year or two I think the Messages file is going to get
unmanageably large--even without any embedded attachments. With Eudora I
could periodically clear out old mail from mailboxes that got uncomfortably
heavy and shift it to deep storage (archive mailboxes like "Sent 99") where
it would still be readily available if needed but where it would no longer
be included in my automatic backups of new and modified files. Surely this
is a better approach than having to create an external archive.
Anyway, I do appreciate all the thought and work that has obviously gone
into creating this application and the willingness of Dennis Cheung from
Microsoft (and perhaps other colleagues I haven't happened to notice) to
hang out on this list. Onward and upward!
__
Jeremy Whipple <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Setagaya-ku, Tokyo
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