Tikkabik

So I spent much of Friday migrating my e-mail from Entourage to the Mail application Apple includes as part of Panther. My boss Jim seems to think it was a good idea, others are less sanguine about the move. What I can tell you is this: I've had no end of problems since I upgraded from Office v.X to Office 2004. I've had to rebuild my Entourage database close to a dozen times.

Our IT director seems to think the problem is in the sheer size of my database: Pushing 4GB, with documentation going back to 1999. I'm a bit of an information pack-rat, and find it enormously convenient to have on hand a searchable directory of e-mails I've received (and occasionally sent). I don't save everything that comes in the door, but I do try to save everything that's relevant to my job and anything that I think keeping a paper(less) trail might be important for.

Regularly, I've been getting an error message from Entourage instructing my that my database is damaged and asking me to fire up its utility software to fix it. I do; the utility verifies the database is damaged, spews out a log that's totally devoid of information, then fixes whatever has happened and allows me to continue.

It's typically an hour out of my life I don't get back. And it happens frequently enough that I've decided to do something about it.

So I imported those five years of e-mail to Mail, and while it took a while, Mail imported them all successfully. It took almost as long to set up my account information and major rules again. I decided as part of this switch that I'd give Mail's IMAP support a try -- we use IMAP at work, and because of how Entourage handled IMAP accounts, I had gone a circuitous route to use POP instead, mainly so all my all my inbound mail would be sorted into the same common directories. As I'm sure you can figure, after five years, I have my own way of doing things.

Turns out Mail's IMAP support is quite logically set up, so I'm now using Mail to ping three different IMAP accounts include my .Mac e-mail (along with three more POP accounts provided by various ISPs).

So far, so good.

I may not be done with Entourage entirely just yet -- there are rumblings that we're going to use its calendaring features as part of a new groupware effort at work. But hopefully Mail will work for me.