Life is complex. Just keeping up with the daily flow of information can be a full-time job. There are schedules to keep, phone numbers and addresses to file, tasks to track, long-range plans to make—and an unending avalanche of email to sort, file, and reply to. Who wouldn’t long for a personal assistant to help keep life and business on track? Make that a couple of assistants—or perhaps…an entourage? Takin’ care of business with an entourage like Elvis’s can get expensive—even if you don’t reward them with jewelry and Cadillacs. But when it comes to managing your computer life, Office 2008’s Entourage can TCB with the best of them. (And that can make you feel like the King.)

Much more than an email program, Entourage can help you schedule meetings, track your to-dos, and scope out your calendars. Since Office 2001, Entourage has sought to be a Mac fan’s personal information manager (PIM) and email program all in one, as well as being a vehicle to tie together all the individual programs. The Project Center, described in Chapter 11, is the nexus for this informational synergy.

In addition to its organizational capabilities, Entourage is at heart a first-rate email program. Entourage handles email and newsgroups with ease, as you’ll see in this chapter. For the first time, Entourage 2008 cooperates with Mac OS X’s Spotlight search to help you find any information you have in Entourage—even in message attachments. And since junk email won’t go away by itself, improved junk mail filters help shield you from the bad, while letting through the good.