Section A.2. Email Programs

A.2. Email Programs

Program	Price	Web site	AppleScript support
Entourage	Only available as part of the Microsoft Office suite ($400)	www.microsoft.com/mac/products/entourage2004/entourage2004.aspx	Excellent. Microsoft Entourage supports many more features than Mac OS X Mail does. For example, you can use Entourage's find command to locate people who have a particular email suffix (like @apple.com).
Eudora	Free with advertisements, or $50 without advertisements	www.eudora.com	Decent. Eudora supports a fair number of AppleScript commands that Mail and Entourage do (like reply), but Eudora doesn't support some of the more advanced commands (like connect to, for automatically downloading your email).
Mail	Free, included with Mac OS X	www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/	Good. Mail allows you to automate sending, receiving, and replying to emailall with AppleScript. Plus, you can use Mail to run scripts automatically when new email arrives. Still, Mail's AppleScript commands are quite complicated compared with, say, Entourage or Mailsmith.
Mailsmith	$99; free 30-day demo available for download	www.barebones.com/products/mailsmith	Exceptional!Brought to you by the makers of BBEdit (see next page), Mailsmith is a powerful and extremely scriptable email applicationso scriptable, in fact, that you can run AppleScripts when you click existing Mailsmith menu items, allowing you to customize the menu bar itself.

Best choice for AppleScript: Mailsmith. When it comes to the program with the mostand most usefulAppleScript commands, Mailsmith wins hands down over Mac OS X Mail and Microsoft Entourage.