[Microsoft Entourage][entourage] is such an interesting piece of software. It evolved from (Mac) Outlook Express which was a great mail client for the old Mac OS (despite its grumpy IMAP implementation). Outlook Express itself took many of its design cues from Claris Emailer, to the extent I believe the early versions of Outlook Express were [coded by peeps who had worked on Claris Emailer][emailer].

I always liked that Outlook Express and Entourage defaulted to plain text for messages. I particularly liked the fact that OE / Entourage defaulted to bottom-posting when replying to a message – as any fule kno top-posting is a hideous convention foisted on us by miserable office mail systems back when there was still a chance that your e-mail would not be delivered via SMTP (Exchange version 5 and earlier is the primary culprit here).

I still get annoyed that when using Mail.app hitting the tab key in a plain-text e-mail inserts a tab character instead of expanding it to four spaces like Entourage.

Given enough time this post would devolve into arguments about [top-posting versus bottom-posting][netiquette], the width of [the one true tab-stop][tabs] and how [HTML e-mail][html] has turned our youths’ minds into mush.

[entourage]: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/entourage2008/
[emailer]: http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2007/05/in_the_beginning.html
[netiquette]: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
[tabs]: http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html
[html]: http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/evilmail.html