I guess I will not be upgrading. To have to pay $279 to be able to use Office on my laptop when away from home, which I would need for its email features, is just a deal killer. My biggest headache right now is the lack of integration of Entourage with Apple AddressBook. The syncing is terrible. Rather than syncing, Entourage creates duplicate records in AddressBook and in itself because all the fields don’t match exactly. I then spend hours cleaning up the duplications. I was hoping the new Outlook would fix that. Now it isn’t worth it. I’d basically be paying $279 to upgrade my mail program. It just isn’t worth it. Word does everything I need to right now and so does Excel almost. I may keep Office 2004 around just for Excel Macros. This is really, really STUPID marketing.

I will be switching to OpenOffice and I’ll find another way of doing mail. Apple Mail doesn’t seem to have enough features for me, and I have trouble making connections with it on non-Apple servers. I’ve had Powermail for years as a backup when Entourage crashed. It integrates completely with AddressBook without duplications. It has had a discrete message format for years, rather than collect all email in a huge, single database, as Entourage does. The one thing I’ll miss is the calendar integration, and perhaps the newsgroup reader.

Anyone have any other recommendations for mail on the Mac?