Getting your emails:
What software can and can’t be used depends on your organization and what they use for emails. Whether it is Microsoft Exchange (most likely), Novell Groupwise, Zimbra, Google Apps, FirstClass or generic POP / IMAP will have an influence because of the way each handles email protocols.

Since email today is so much more – contact sharing, calendaring and project management / scheduling, some features may work seamlessly and others only partially. Find out from the IT department what they use as an email platform if you aren’t sure. In most organizations, its going to be Microsoft Exchange.

Let’s look at this from the email client side. In OS X, we’ll look at the big three – Apple Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird.

Apple Mail:
Apple’s Mail.app is quite nice, and can handle POP / IMAP quite well. It integrates well with Address Book for contacts and iCal for calendaring but it is strictly an email client. Rather than an all-in-one solution, the three programs are tightly integrated together. If your workplace uses open standards for email / calendaring / contacts then Apple Mail would fit in well.

To use Apple Mail within an Exchange environment, some things need to be opened on the server side. Most IT departments will have Outlook Web Access opened and Mail can sync through OWA, however it has been known to be buggy, especially with large mailboxes. As of this writing, the latest version – Exchange 2007, does not work at all with Apple Mail. If your organization is planning an upgrade or already has, you will need to use Microsoft’s Entourage.

While Apple’s Mail can work with Exchange for email, if your workplace uses calendaring, invitation scheduling, public folders and contact sharing they may not work the same. Personally, I have never used Mail with Exchange and after all the internet scouring that I did for this article and reading about others experiences, I would not recommend using Apple Mail for Exchange email and we won’t go into a tutorial for it. The good news, however is that Apple has licensed ActiveSync for Exchange in the iPhone and it is a possibility that this may be integrated into a future version of Mail.

Mozilla Thunderbird:
Like Apple’s Mail.app, Thunderbird is great if your company is using open standards. With Mozilla’s Lightning plug-in for the Sunbird calendaring project, you can have the all-in-one email client solution. As far as Exchange support, it goes about as far as Apple Mail does, and I wouldn’t recommend it either.

Microsoft Entourage:
An important feature in Microsoft Office for Mac is the support for Microsoft Exchange – most likely your company’s email system. Instead of Outlook, you will be using Entourage. Before we begin, there are three important things to highlight:

1. If you are using Office 2008, make sure you are using either the Office 2008 for Mac (Full) or the Office 2008 Special Media Edition. The Home and Student Edition does not support Exchange email.

2. Entourage does not access Exchange servers the same way that Outlook does. Entourage uses the OWA (Outlook Web Access) protocol, while Outlook uses the Microsoft MAPI protocol. In order to use Entourage with Exchange, the OWA protocol must be opened up on the server end. In most places, OWA is opened up already but its possible this may be turned off for security reasons.

3. Even though Entourage works with Exchange, its actually not the same as Outlook. Unfortunately, if you run into major headaches getting your calendar and contacts to work properly, you may want to just boot into Windows via Boot Camp or run Outlook via Parallels / VMWare Fusion. I know, its not exactly a solution but due to Microsoft’s death-like grip on their MAPI protocol, its a decent work around.

Next Page: Setting up Entourage for your company’s email system.

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