Leopard Mail vs. Thunderbird vs. Entourage 08 -- which is best?

[jaywl]

I moved to Mac about half a year ago, and partly owing to my familiarity with Thunderbird for Windows I've been using Thunderbird for Mac. However, I upgraded my machine to Leopard recently and was impressed with the quick look feature for viewing attachments that it is Leopard Mail. That feature alone made me think it might be time to change. This week, I bought Office:Mac 2008, and noticed it comes with Entourage, which appears to be a pretty impressive mail program as well (at least at first glance).

So my question is: which do you recommend and why?

For me, important qualities for my mail program include:
- security
- usability (I don't mind learning new things, but I want a full-featured program. For example, the built-in search tool in Thunderbird has not impressed me. It's quick but I find it limited sometimes.)
- stability (I had Eudora for PC before and it used to crash every so often if I forgot to compress my inbox or move messages frequently enough. That was a pain.)
- Handy, time-saving features. (I don't do very complicated things with my email program, but I use it all the time.)

 

[blodwyn]

I moved to Mac about half a year ago, and partly owing to my familiarity with Thunderbird for Windows I've been using Thunderbird for Mac. However, I upgraded my machine to Leopard recently and was impressed with the quick look feature for viewing attachments that it is Leopard Mail. That feature alone made me think it might be time to change. This week, I bought Office:Mac 2008, and noticed it comes with Entourage, which appears to be a pretty impressive mail program as well (at least at first glance).

So my question is: which do you recommend and why?

For me, important qualities for my mail program include:
- security
- usability (I don't mind learning new things, but I want a full-featured program. For example, the built-in search tool in Thunderbird has not impressed me. It's quick but I find it limited sometimes.)
- stability (I had Eudora for PC before and it used to crash every so often if I forgot to compress my inbox or move messages frequently enough. That was a pain.)
- Handy, time-saving features. (I don't do very complicated things with my email program, but I use it all the time.)

For me Apple Mail is better than Thunderbird because of the integration with iCal and because I'm a MailTags and Mail Act-on user.

I used Entourage (2004) on my work Exchange server for several years and found it to be reliable and stable. Be aware that it stores all the emails, folder structure, contacts, calendar, etc in one big database file. This makes for a lot of Time Machine disk usage. You can exclude it from the TM backup, but then you have to make other arrangements for backing up your email, unless you're using IMAP of course.