Moving from Entourage 2004--Outlook or Mail?

[Doxiegirl]

Hi all--

First, thanks for the wealth of information on this forum--I have lurked quite a bit the past several days and learned a lot. Here is my situation.

I am finally upgrading from a 2007 white Macbook to a refurbished 2012 Macbook Air which I should receive in the next couple of days, and I want to move all of my old e-mails from Entourage 2004 onto the new computer. I rely on Word & Excel so I know I'm going to have to buy MS Office 2011, since I have read that 2004 (the version I own) doesn't work on Mountain Lion. My question is--should I buy Outlook or use Apple's Mail? Or is there another option that is even better?

From what I understand Mail works better with the Mac OS, which makes sense. But I do want to make sure that (1) I can pull in and keep old e-mail folders & their content from Entourage into whatever client I use, and (2) when others read the e-mails I send, formatting is clean. I am a writer and when submitting work I usually have to copy/paste sample pages into the body of the e-mail, and I want to minimize strange line breaks/weird characters when my e-mails are read so that I don't get a rejection simply because something didn't translate well across e-mail systems.

So which would best suit my needs--Outlook or Mail? Alternatively, I do use Gmail at work and wouldn't be completely opposed to switching over to that if it works better, though it does mean I'll have to let all my contacts know I've changed my primary e-mail address, which is a bit of a pain.

Also, what is the best way to transfer my old e-mails into the new client? I've read that I need to pull the individual folders onto the desktop to create mbox files--then simply save them onto an external drive and pull them into Apple Mail? Any advice or links to resources here would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[ylrd]

These links might help you:

• http://www.office.mvps.org/import_export/
• http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_switch_entourage_mail
• http://smallbusiness.chron.com/export-entourage-emails-import-apple-mail-55784.html

While I'd just switch to Mail, I think you're accustomed to Microsoft's software and Outlook would suit your needs better than Mail. However, you should know that Mail would serve you just fine.

You can create smart mailboxes to automatically organise messages, rules to organise messages by sender/text/color/remittent, you can create as much folders as you want, formatting is impeccable and the UI is pretty easy-to-use.

It's your decision.

 

[Doxiegirl]

Thanks for the links and the input, ylrd. I'm away from home now but will definitely explore further when I get home. I may try Mail first since it's free and I am not particularly attached to Office email. As long as I can import my old emails and folders and formatting of outgoing messages works fine, I'll be good. Thanks again for the help!

 

[glenthompson]

My experience may help you out. I used Outlook on Windows for years. When I switched to the Mac, I used Outlook 2011 since it came with Office. I was disappointed in how different it was and did not like the way it worked. I switched to Mail and have been very happy with it. Since I now have an iPad and iPhone, Mail and iCloud works better with them. I no longer have to deal with Exchange so that's not a consideration.

I switched to a me.com email address and have all my other email address forwarded to that account. You can use Mail with multiple accounts but I prefer to only deal with one.

 

[Thraun]

I'd also like to point out, that from a performance standpoint, Outlook (as with all the other MS Office apps) is a bloody memory hog. Most people leave their email clients on and running in the background, for obvious reasons, and if you're using Outlook you will notice your machine running considerably slower than if you were using Apple Mail.

So, if you have no particular attachment to the MS programs, avoid them like the plague they are.

 

[Doxiegirl]

Thanks for sharing your experience, glenthompson--that's exactly the kind of input I was looking for. And Thraun, what you said confirms other things I've read about MS taking up a lot of memory. Unfortunately I do need Word and Excel, but I'm happy to bypass Outlook if I don't need it, and it doesn't sound like I do. Guess I'll spend a good bit of tomorrow transferring e-mails over and getting Mail set up on my new Macbook Air. Thanks again everyone who has helped me so far!

 

[KUguardgrl13]

I've had Office for Mac 2008 for a couple of years and could never get Entourage to work with my Exchange account for school. I've been using Mail for 4 years now.

If your email account is Exchange or something like that, once you input it into Mail it should download all messages you have on the server. At least mine does.

 

[Doxiegirl]

I've had Office for Mac 2008 for a couple of years and could never get Entourage to work with my Exchange account for school. I've been using Mail for 4 years now.

If your email account is Exchange or something like that, once you input it into Mail it should download all messages you have on the server. At least mine does.

As many times as Entourage has been crashing for me lately, I will be glad to leave Microsoft behind in terms of e-mail! Thanks for sharing your experience--I'm looking forward to the switchover.

 

[dianeoforegon]

Hi all--
I am finally upgrading from a 2007 white Macbook to a refurbished 2012 Macbook Air which I should receive in the next couple of days, and I want to move all of my old e-mails from Entourage 2004 onto the new computer.

Be aware that you will need to export your data from Entourage 2004 before you get your new computer. Entourage 2004 will not run under either Lion/Mountain Lion. You will need to clean up your data while you can still open Entourage.

Don't count on either Entourage 2008 or Office 2011 to import from your Entourage 2004 Identity if it's corrupted.

Mail would not be able to import from a corrupt Entourage identity either since it requires Entourage to be open to import.

You can download and run this script on your Entourage Identity. This will verify your data and the files can be used by Mail to import your data. Mail will not import a .rge file. The Entourage Database Utility "Verify" function is not very accurate.

Export folders as MBOX files (includes subfolders)


The script will fail on a folder with corruption. If there is no corruption the script will export all folders. With a clean report you can now export as .rge file for use with Entourage and/or Outlook.

Even though Outlook no longer stores data in a database like Entourage, it has known stability issues. If you only use POP accounts, I would recommend moving to Apple Mail.

One last piece of info that might aid in your decision. Neither Entourage 2008 nor Outlook 2011 support CalDAV or CardDAV that is required to sync to iCloud Calendar and Contacts. You can use both with iCloud email.

 

[Doxiegirl]

You can download and run this script on your Entourage Identity. This will verify your data and the files can be used by Mail to import your data. Mail will not import a .rge file. The Entourage Database Utility "Verify" function is not very accurate.

Export folders as MBOX files (includes subfolders)

Thanks Diane--I did export all my Entourage folders as MBOX files and it worked like a charm. I'm now happily using Mail and looking forward to learning it more fully.

 

[happy cool]

I would like to recommend SysInfoTools MBOX Converter that offers to convert entourage files to Outlook along with the attachments. This tool runs on a Mac computer without any hassle. Besides PST format, this tool is capable of saving MBOX file’s data into a new file of EML, RTF, PST, HTML, and MSG formats.