I don’t love the smell of Entourage and Rosetta in the morning

About once a year I get terrifically bored and decide that I want to mix things up. Unfortunately I never mix things up in a way that’s somehow a betterment of society. No, I just go and dork with my electronic system of working until I get fed up and go back to the old system.

This year, I decided I was going to ditch Mail.app and iCal in favor of Entourage.

My reasons were simple (digital wanderlust not withstanding):

1. We use Exchange for email and scheduling. iCal’s integration with Exchange is, hmm, “If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all”, all what the heck, it’s terrible.

2. Mail.app sometimes shows my read email as unread even after I tell it that yes in fact I did read it and no I didn’t just stare at it blankly.

I knew that Entourage wasn’t really an Exchange client like Outlook and it wasn’t a Universal Binary yet but I could add some rationalizations to my list of reasons:

A. The MacBU said that the Universal Binary version was coming out this fall so no more emulation was in sight. I even had a guy who had a source who knew some stuff that let it slip that this might actually be true.

B. Entourage has this tempting “Project Center” feature where I could setup these elaborate projects that would keep all the files, contacts, emails and everything together. In short, I would be The Organized.

As you can guess by now, this was all a dismal failure.

Before we get to the gritty details, here’s a little background on the two possible ways of dealing with email/calendaring data. The first way, which I will call “The Big Heaping Pile Stack” way works where you really only have two email folders, an inbox and an archive. When a mail comes in you read it, do something about it or reply to it, and then off it goes into the archive. There’s no hierarchy, no structure, just a big folder filled with all the emails mixed together which then relies on the power of search to find what you need later.

The other way, which I shall dub, “The Dewey Decimal without the Decimals” has a whole bunch of folders in which you can move emails. There can even be folders inside folders, massive towers of structure where everything has a place. The workflow here is that you read your email, do something with it or reply to it, decide where in the folder pyramid it is supposed to live, and then finally move it there. The theory is that because of the organizational structure and because you’ve preprocessed where the email is supposed to go that you should be able to find it when you need it.

Given my penchant for stacks, which one of these do you think is my more natural way of living?

Come on. Seriously. Look at the names for Pete’s sake.

“The Dewey Decimal without the Decimals”

“The Big Heaping Pile Stack”

Looking back at my rationales we can see being The Organized just doesn’t fit the way my mind is set up. I am certainly organized, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around any kind of taxonomy where I have to decide what I’ll need in the future now. “Do I put this email about how to apply field dressing for a burn into the ‘Safety Tips’ folder or the ‘One thousand reasons why owning a flamethrower would be the coolest’ folder?” See, there’s no right answer there for me and god knows I don’t want to go looking in the wrong place when I have a massive burn on one hand and a flamethrower in the other.

The thing that pushed me over the edge though was Office 2008 for the Mac being delayed until January. The speed penalty for running Entourage in Rosetta was just getting to be too much. I mean, if I was running in native speed checking two folders to solve my burn problem probably wouldn’t be too bad. I’ve got the feeling though that that situation has a real time is of the essence thing about it so I probably best not dawdle.

All this means is that I’m now back to Mail.app which has fast search for my big archive folder even if it still shows some mails as new. I’m also back to iCal and the copy/paste sit-ups that are required for using it with Exchange but the path is now paved for fun with napalm. Now I don’t have to waste time organizing my email and I can instead focus on buying something that will put me on a number of government watch lists.

Toasty yours,

Smokey Grant Lammi