>> Although it is known that Spotlight will not index the Entourage database, it might make sense to export individual emails that have an assigned Project to their respective project folders in the Finder, thereby allowing indexing of those (probably important) emails by Spotlight.
>
> I did something a bit simpler. I imported all the entourage mail into Mail. Then I backed up my entourage archive and got rid of all my old mail in entourage.
>
> Most of the emails I'm interested in looking for are old, and I use Mail as the app to read those emails (and as a way to test mail and see if it's ready for a jump from Entourage).
>
> Entourage is basically now just my inbox/outbox with new stuff. The benefit here is that now my entourage searches are also much quicker as 1 have just a few hundred emails instead on several gigs.
>
> I was thinking I could go even further by creating an Automator script to take read emails in entourage and export them to mail... maybe doing this once a week.
>
> It's kludgy but after 3 days of using Spotlight on my email archive, I never want to go back to the several minute wait I had when doing an entourage search. Also Spotlight, at least for me, is changing the way I use my archived data. Now it is really accessible, and I'm starting to use it all the time as opposed to once in a blue moon.
>
> I would still rather have an updated Entourage with a spotlight plugin, but mail itself is also getting pretty darned good!
>
> all best,
> raul
> http://www.mexicanpictures.com
I've also thought of switching to Mail2, but it would require a change in the paradigm I use to do my work. Would smart folders/ mailboxes somehow be a better way to categorize mail than are categories and projects?
But there are some features of Entourage I'd really miss:
CategoriesThere is always the possibility that MS will redo their database structure to allow storage of individual items. By integrating Spotlight, they would not have to code as much for many of the functions what would have to be rewritten. The problem is, they’ll never tell us their plans and we’ll never know that they’re going to do this. Pity, as I’m sure a number of users will have left by then.
Projects
A rich set of rules and scripting environment
The very full featured and useful Calendar with notifications
The support of this mailing list that has allowed resolving numerous issues
A junk mail filter that, while inscrutable, works really really well
Views that are easy to set up and use to find work
Integration with Excel, Word, and PowerPoint in terms of projects
There are many others I don’t have the time to think of or mention here.
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B-r-u -c-e
