I tried to use MailSmith as an Entourage replacement for about an hour this evening. It's very cool, I love the scriptability, the powerful text editing and the lightweight - but I've thrown it away already.
Entourage (despite all it's failings, like the inability to export, to sync with Palm etc) is still the best mail app I've ever used. In case you're wondering, I'm not an M$ sympathiser (I'm using OSX for f'ks sake) but it is good.
Here's why I can't live without Entourage anymore:
Received since launch view - this is awesome. It shows me every mail that I have received since I started Entourage in one place (sorted by date received of course). When everyone filters their mail into a million separate folders, viewing incoming emails is a complete pain in the ass. The inbox is now useless (as it only contains spam) and you need to click around to view new mail. With this view created I can quickly overview all incoming mail as it arrives. Slick. I never knew how much I missed this feature until I didn't have it for an hour.
Flagged mail - I like to click the 'Flag' button and flag mails to return to later. Then I have a view setup to view different types of flagged mails. For example, mail in the Atlassian folder receives greater answering priority that the rebelutionary folder - sorry guys. I thought Labels in MailSmith might do this, but then I still need to click around the folders in the query results window to view mails.
Clickable URLs - Why oh why aren't URLs in MailSmith clickable? Surely this is a basic tenet of any mail program today! (No, command-click doesn't count - it requires two hands)
No HTML mail - Actually, this isn't such a big deal (the text rendered view usually looks ok) but there should be a single button to click to open mail in the browser (it's 3 clicks at the moment by my count).
The "fuck me" interface - As a good designer friend of mine always says, successful applications have "fuck me" graphics. I like the configurability of MailSmith (deeply integrated scripting is very cool) but it's just... boring looking?
