Assignment for the Apple Mail team.

After many years of devoted use, I dumped Microsoft Entourage after it managed to lose months’ worth of emails.

And I switched to Apple Mail. It’s a great time saver in the way it tightly integrates address book, iCal, and allows painless downloading attachments to iPhoto.

(Entourage integrates with other Office products, but only in their little walled garden of Microsoft monopoly.)

However:

1) We desperately need a way to color-code a recipient without jumping through the hoops of adding it to a "rule." Entourage has made this absurdly simple for years. It's one of the most important things I miss, and consider it a major drawback of Apple Mail.

For example, when I get un-categorized emails, I usually want to add the sender to my various color lists for friends, work, politics, technology, or whatever. This way, one can scan subsequent incoming messages and separate the wheat from the chaff. (Especially important if you get five dozen new messages a day, as I do.)

To do this with Apple Mail using Rules is an irritating, confusing two-minute job — so most of the time, you don't do it.

With Entourage, it’s a matter of just clicking the “categories” pane at the top.

2) Though Apple emails that you've forwarded have an arrow next to them in the message pane, if these or other messages are sitting open on the desktop (and I often have dozens of like this), there's nothing on them to show their status.

Look at the illustration to see how Entourage elegantly handles these needs.

Apple, is there some reason your programmers can’t manage to adopt these crucial features?