I’ve very recently switched to using a MacBook Pro at work, and consequently have moved from using Microsoft Outlook to Microsoft Entourage as my main email client.

As an aside, I rather dislike Outlook, and have tried Thunderbird, but Exchange’s IMAP implementation is broken, causing all sorts of grief, and the lack of calendar integration drove me back to Outlook, horrible as it is.

Back to the main thread, both clients, Outlook and Entourage, are written by Microsoft (although I think by different departments), but Entourage is infinitely better. Here’s where Entourage beats Outlook:

• Search actually works! It’s integrated with Spotlight, but it works!
• Threading messages works reasonably well too (sorting by conversation), and isn’t ugly like Outlook.
• When you view a message that you’ve previously replied to, the window has a small yellow bar that states “You replied to this message on 01/05/08. Show Reply”. Click on the Show Reply and you see your reply. This feature is so insanely simple to use, and very powerful.
• Entourage allows you to mark a message as “To Do”, which a date. Any message marked as such shows up in your Task List.

That’s just barely scratching the surface, but these simple features make Entourage actually usable. Why can’t Outlook have these as well?