Like most Mac users, I spend most of my day chewing up work in Microsoft's Word and Entourage applications. So when Microsoft sent me the latest versions of these apps (in the new Office 2004), I was drooling.
Among the more pleasant surprises I discovered was that Entourage has redesigned its spam filtering system. It is not a fancy artificial intelligence system like SpamFire or SpamSieve, but it works incredibly well. In three weeks of use, it has not put one good e-mail in the junk file.
Entourage is Microsoft's OSX equivalent to Outlook e-mail and personal information manager, and this new superior spam filter is just one of the features that makes it a worthwhile upgrade. Users who only get three or four e-mails a day will like the new option to see messages in a three-column view.
This view puts the list of received e-mails on the left side of the monitor next to the folders list, and displays the e-mail text on the right in a big window. The benefit is that the mail is much larger and easier to read.
But if you have to deal with 30 or 40 e-mails a day, you will probably prefer the old way of doing things with the list at the top, the e-mail text beneath it and folders to the left.
Nonetheless, I suspect non-power users will prefer the larger e-mail window and appreciate the change. The Entourage e-mail list window, which displays all the messages in the selected folder (such as In Box), now comes with the day header Today above the e-mail received for the day. The same is true for Yesterday, the previous days of the week, plus previous weeks, months and years. I am sure some people will find this useful for locating old e-mails, but it takes up valuable window space, and because it cannot be turned off, it is certain to rile some users.
But Entourage is meant for business users, and this is where its features are most satisfying. It has much improved compatibility with Microsoft's Exchange Server. If your organisation uses Exchange Server, you will now be able to interact with your PC-using colleagues. That means calendar syncs, meeting notifications, address book sharing, and e-mail sending and receiving on the office server.