Glad you said it, I was going to, but figured someone would just tell
me I need a new computer, reinstall my OS, or more ram, or whatever...
On Feb 6, 2008, at 10:26 AM, Barry Rosenbaum wrote:
I’ve been using Entourage 2008 for a few weeks now, and I must state
my deep disappointment.
I tested it for a hour, posted here about font rendering issues, and
removed it entirely. It took me 2 days, about 5 hours each day, to
get mail.app to work in a usable way. it is different, but I am
getting used to it. I spent about 30.00 on two 3rd party plug in
tools for mail.app, stil less than the cost of office.
No outbound rules in mail.app is the largest bummer, maybe a show-
stopper for some. There are plug-ins that may help you in this regard.
I know I’ll be bombarded by apologists telling me that it must be
something in my computer or my software because no one else is
having ANY problems with this majestic work of art. But I was
expecting a performance boost from the UB version of Entourage, and
have seen the exact opposite.
You must have too many rules, too many fonts, too many connections
etc :-)
For the attempted nit-pickers, I’m using a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and 150 GB hard drive less than half
full, running OS X 10.4.11 with no haxies.
I am using a dual 2.0 G5, older machine, Entourage was popping in on 8
email accounts, at about 15 seconds or more to pop in, and then drop
that connection on the remote server end.
Mail.app does this in maybe, tops, 2 seconds, its so fast, it is hard
to tell.
And I don't really care what anyone says, pop logins are slow, and
proven, and reported, and a Entourage developer confirmed it,
mentioned the network code needs work. This was about 1 years ago.
Entourage has gone from being my favorite program to sheer drudgery.
It’s no joke that an Entourage operation consists of “click and
count to 5”. There is a serious delay before executing virtually any
operation in Entourage. The behavior of the scroll wheel and the
scroll feature on the touch pad when reading messages are at best
unreliable and frequently just non-functional. The “cosmetic
improvements” look like they were handed off by the lauded MBU
people to the color-blind and tasteless Windows graphics designers.
And the decision to abandon Treo users to the vagaries of multi-
layered Sync-Services-based synchronization is just about the most
offensive applications software decision I’ve encountered in 40
years in the computer industry.
Aesthetics aside, the app needs a year in tuning only, no new features
at all, and sure, go ahead, charge me for it, I don't care.
It uses a total hack to get into spotlight, you have to remove it from
time machine if you don't want your drive chugging on a 2GB email
database every 20 minutes. And no, I am not about to change my
workflow to break my database up into smaller chunks. Why should I
change because someone decided to go proprietary on a data store.
So I suspect that the performance issues, which will be hotly denied
in responses to this email, will eventually be fixed, even though
they didn’t exist. And the color schemes, font choices and other
aesthetic elements will get worse and better at random for the sake
of change alone. (Does anyone beside me have to do a double take
when clicking on the “Window” menu to figure out which window to
select?). But unless there’s a Palm conduit in the offing, and it
appears there will not be, I’m going to be forced to use the Apple
apps if for no other reason than accurate and reliable
synchronization with my PDA.
I don't think the performance issues will be fixed much. They will
sit and wait for faster hardware. Form the little I can gather from
off list talks and such, Entourage still uses some chunks of code,
networking and text rendering, that were part of the OS 9 days. That
was what, a decade ago? If it has not been changed in that time, I
don't think we can expect it to change any time soon.
Funny thing is, I thought IMAP was a terrible standard, and junk, and
never recommended it to users. I put my girlfriend on it, with here
whopping 50MB mail files. Teaching her to clean her emails of
attachments to not bog down the IMAP server.
Moved her to mail.app, guess what, IMAP is great. I am transitioning
a few GB of email into IMAP, and mail.app is loving it. IMAP is a
terrific protocol, Entourage has a terrible connection layer, and
makes IMAP appear to suck.
And oh yeah. The Apple apps are MUCH quicker.
From launch time to connections to rule firing to applescript, mail
is running spinning beach balls around Entourage in performance. It
is not as feature rich, but the time I spend making up for the lack of
features is still less than the time I spent waiting on Entourage.
This list has been very helpful over the years, and I admire the
hardworking people in the MBU and on this list who have kept the Mac
alive by providing software compatible with the main Windows apps
for business. But this latest upgrade should have been a major
improvement, at least in speed, especially for the price, and I’ve
found it to be anything but.
I agree, love the list, there are great folks here, and I considered
not using mail.app as the developers here are at least a little
approachable. If mail.app has a total breakdown one day, I have no
where to go, other than the Apple boards. That was a consideration,
and a risk I had to calculate.
--
Scott
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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