The Transition Process from Entourage – initial observations

I am now on day 3 of the transition to Postbox.  I went ahead and bit the bullet, and got version 1.1.5 and am beta testing version 2. If you buy the program on the first day you download it, it is $29.95 instead of $39. Since I had demoed it on my laptop, the fresh download on my desktop gave me an opportunity to buy it for the discount price.

The Quirks and Laborious

Rather than try to import from Mail, I decided to do it longhand and export the mbox folders from Entourage. I tried the scripts I mentioned before, but not all the mail boxes in subfolders export, so I ended up dragging and dropping some of them from Entourage to a folder on my desktop and then dragging them into the Application Support>Postbox folder inside my Library, as they tell you to do in the link I posted previously.  So, I finally got my local mail transferred and I then manually reorganized the folder hierarchy to suit me.

I have started creating filters to sort incoming mail. I suspect this process is going to take several days, so for now I am using a 2 email system, both Entourage and Postbox, getting duplications of my mail in each program. No problem with that.

What I like about Entourage is that when I go to POP mail, it definitely downloads the mail to local folders. The Inbox is the inbox on my computer. But with Postbox, the Inbox for my POP account is on my server. I could manually drag the emails to my local inbox, but that defeats the purpose, and I would have to duplicate my filters to filter both the online mailbox and on my local folders.

BUG!!!!... I lost all my filters from yesterday. Apparently, if you close down the program while the filters window  is open, you lose all your filters. This bug exists on all versions of the program, 2 and 1. It is a real show stopper.  I lost all my work from yesterday.

Cosmetic complaint: After years of using Entourage, I have gotten used to the font sizes and faces in the list view. There is even a little light line that separates the messages in the list so it is easier to read across.  While Postbox can change default font faces and sizes in html and plain text emails, there doesn’t seem to be any way to control the message list view’s appearance.  After 3 hours working with the program, my eyes were fatigued in a way they are not with Entourage.  I need to be able to modify the views.

I’m starting to think that Postbox, while full of wonderful features, is not quite ready for prime time. It is better than Powermail and Eudora, but I might have to maintain Entourage as my work horse for a while longer.