Goodbye PC, hello Mac: Day 2, migrating email

One of the biggest deci­sions to make when migrat­ing from PC to Mac is where to put email.  Since I pur­chased Office for Mac, I can either use Microsoft Entourage (there is no Mac Out­look), or use the three pro­grams built into the Mac OS.  See, Mac divides them up between Mail, iCal, and Address Book.  They are sep­a­rate, but inte­grated.  After asking around I decided not to use Entourage and try the native Mac appli­ca­tions first.

Migrat­ing Out­look to Mail
This was not as easy as iTunes.  You need a pro­gram to export the Out­look files to a Mail rec­og­nized format.  I found one for $10 at lit​tlema​chines.com.  This pro­gram exports your Out­look cal­en­dar, con­tacts, and email to files that can be imported by Mac.

Mar­ble­head uses Zimbra for our Exchange server, so not every­thing needed to be con­verted.  That’s where it gets com­pli­cated.  Zimbra had some things on the server, but not every­thing.  I’m cur­rently trying to figure out what needs to be exported from Out­look and loaded into Mail.  I hope the import process is smart enough to detect dupli­cates, oth­er­wise it’s going to be a mess.

Does anyone have any tips?  Is Mail better than Entourage in your experience?