Why Entourage for Mac is better than Thunderbird

When it comes to the Macintosh platform, users options for email clients are somewhat limited. There are several open source programs, but many of them are seriously lacking in robust business features.   I guess you could say that I “drank the Kool-Aid” about open source applications. I love Firefox, and it’s amazing array of extensions, so I assumed that this love fest would also apply to Thunderbird. To an extent Thunderbird is the best open source email client one can get. From a business standpoint I find Thunderbird to very limited for many reasons.

HTML emails are important
I have found that Thunderbird’s primitive HTML editing abilities to be raw and very unfinished. For instance there are annoying bugs such as formatting problems when you are typing a new email. Often Thunderbird for no reason will switch the look of the typeface from one paragraph to the other.   Also there are many issues with very simple signature files becoming totally mangled once they enter the “Outlook ecosystem”. Now some will say this isn’t the fault of Thunderbird team, it’s Microsoft’s evil Outlook that is the problem. I don’t buy this; it’s a fact cold and hard that Outlook owns the corporate email space. Thunderbird needs to play nice if it hopes to succeed. And how unprofessional does it look for your emails to arrive in your client’s in-box looking like scrambled eggs. With Entourage formatting is consistent, Entourage even has tools to “reformat” incoming emails so you can re-send to others. Users can select “auto text cleanup” to remove those nasty quoting from forward, forwarded emails.   Features like that make Entourage a jewel when it comes to creating professional looking emails.

Meeting Requests
Thunderbird, via the Lightning plug-in (and in 2009 it will be built into Thunderbird 3.0) can now achieve many of the features of Entourage. But after using the very beta plug-in for a few months I couldn’t take the very rough edges. One of my biggest beefs with Lightning is the way it requires you to enter meetings using 24 hour format. I found this very hard to use and goodness knows how the meeting request looked to my corporate clients. Using Entourage you have a well-polished UI to make and send meeting requests.

Resource Footprint
One of the biggest reasons I selected Thunderbird was due to its non-bloat-ware RAM footprint. I did some testing and discovered that Thunderbird only uses around 70MB of RAM during normal use.   I figured this was small, since many of my applications (Photoshop) normally using 10x that amount of RAM. But after using Thunderbird for a few months, I realized it was very buggy. It would often crash 2 or 3 times a day. Keep in mind I have 10 GIG of RAM on my MacPro. So resources are not an issue for me. When I switched to Entourage I figured it would use a lot more RAM. WRONG! Entourage uses around 80MB of RAM on a normal day. Yes, that’s right it uses about the same amount of resources as Thunderbird. And so far no crashes after using it for 4 weeks.   My only beef with Entourage (like all other Office 2008 applications for the Mac is the start up time is a bit laggy, but I have noticed a few service packs from Microsoft has started to solve this problem)

OS X Integration
I have several programs on my Mac that share the default OS X address book. It’s very handy to have all my addresses centralized so no one application is out of date. For instance I use “Billings” to do all my company invoicing. It uses the address book for the client list. Thunderbird doesn’t have the ability to sync its address book with the OS X Address book. Unlike Thunderbird, Entourage can sync its address book with the OS X Address book.

Conclusion
I have come to the conclusion that you get what you pay for. If you have no money Thunderbird, might be for you. But I believe these applications come at a cost. The cost is loss of productivity dealing with others in a corporate setting. People often do not take their time into account. The easy to use Entourage UI and the integration with other applications has made Entourage my pick for an email client on the Mac.