While plenty of people seem to hate Apple Mail, there are just as many that like it. I happen to fall into the like it category; at least most of the time. My biggest complaint with Mail is it’s lack of “proper” Exchange support. Yes, yes, I know that I can set up an Exchange account in Mail, however, it uses IMAP to connect to the Exchange server. Unfortunately, that’s completely useless if IMAP is turned off on the Exchange server and you need to use MAPI (Microsoft’s “Messaging Application Programming Interface”) to connect. In that case, the only option (at least on the Mac) is to use Entourage. Entourage is basically the bastard step-brother of Outlook on Windows, except that it sucks a little less than Outlook does.

While I don’t mind Entourage as much as Outlook, I still find it pretty painful to use and some of the interface is just completely brain-dead. For example, why in the hell are all the fonts anti-aliased? They actually got this right in Office v.X’s Entourage, but broke it in Office 2004’s Entourage. If I specifically have my system set to not render 9pt (or below) text as anti-aliased, I expect my mail client of all things to respect that. Secondly, why can’t I change the maximum line-length? If you compose messages in plain text (as all email should be, don’t even get me started on that), Entourage forces wrapping at 76 characters. That’s fine for the original message, but once you get a few replies, things start getting ugly. Lines break all over the place and it makes it impossible to read anything that was previously quoted. And what the hell is up with the top posting? Argh, it drives me nuts!

See what this does to me? Now I’m all flustered, dammit.

Please, Apple… PLEASE. I’m begging you… make the Exchange support in Mac OS X Leopard’s (a.k.a., 10.5, the next version of Mac OS X) Mail.app MAPI aware so that people who work for a company where their retarded IT department has IMAP access turned off can use a mail client that doesn’t suck. Why is it turned off you ask? I have no idea… the Exchange server is only accessible from inside the office network, so I don’t know what in the hell they think they’re protecting… *sigh*

Bleh.