A digression on Entourage

Microsoft 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.

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, the width of the one true tab-stop and how HTML e-mail has turned our youths’ minds into mush.