Sometimes it only requires a little nudge to make a needed switch. After palm sync miserably failed with Entourage, keychain-related errors was all it took for me to dump my PIM of 3 years. It was time too: my contacts are in vCard and my calendar in iCal (via Mozilla Calendar).
Enter Mozilla Thunderbird. Like Firefox, I turned up my noise at ugly, uninteresting early version of this Mozilla project. But, also like Firefox, the 0.8 version won my allegiance. 0.8 has compelling features (RSS reader, cool extensions), met or beat the features I had in Entourage (Advanced formatting, return receipt settings) and the move was easy. Drag folders from Entourage (making MBOX files) and drop them in my Thunderbird profile (Mail folder). Addresses were almost as easy. Export from Entourage (via File menu) and import as text file. The only pain here was matching up the fields.
The spam filters are pretty darn good too. I didn’t have Entourage 2004 on my computer long enough to migrate to it, and it’s already gone. Very nice. Things to look for in upcoming Thunderbird releases: vCard import and better blog notifications.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
October 22nd, 2004 at 12:29 pm
You don’t mention any comparisons to OS Mail. You don’t mention how to import Mail address book into Thunderbird.
It is actually quite difficult and time consumming. That is the main reason I have not switched to Thunderbird.
October 22nd, 2004 at 1:49 pm
True, but vCard support is in the works for Thunderbird, which would make migrating Apple’s Address Book easier. When that will happen, I don’t know…
October 24th, 2004 at 11:12 am
I’d love to use it, but doesn’t make sense when trying to work in an Exchange environment. Of course, neither does using Entourage. : )
Spread the word, we NEED an OS X MAPI e-mail client!! Someone PLEASE do some reverse-engineering!
November 11th, 2004 at 11:48 pm
I thought Entourage 2004 DOES have Exchange support. No?
November 12th, 2004 at 7:42 am
Entourage does have Exchange support, Thunderbird doesn’t. Also, you can convert your Address Book to a file Thunderbird can import with this or this.
November 19th, 2004 at 9:55 am
I’d love to switch to Thunderbird from Entourage, but I have a bunch of different mailboxes, plus filters (rules) and accounts set up in Entourage. Switching would require exporting every mailox as an mbox (not all that bad) but also would require setting up all those email accounts and rules by hand. And I’m not quite ready to switch to something still in beta. Once it’s released, I may very well just bite the bullet and spend the several hours it will take to switch over.
January 29th, 2005 at 11:51 am
Switching from Entourage to Thunderbird
For quite a while now I’ve been interested in switching from Entourage to Thunderbird for my mail client on my Mac. The difficulty has been that I store a lot of mail in folders in Entourage and could not figure…