I've playing around with Office 2007 beta courtesy of Parallels Desktop for OS X and Windows XP. And I'm shocked.

I like the new interface for the most part, BUT having checked out Outlook 2007, Microsoft have still not provided a decent quoting system for their Windows Exchange client.

Entourage 2004, their Mac Exchange client, surprised me when I first used it, by utilising a proper quoting system with a one line attribution, quote marks (> ), and everything! Windows users have to contend with the standard:

----- Original Message -----
From: xxx@xxx.com
To: yyy@yyy.com
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 10:31 AM
Subject: RE: My email client is brain dead!

Sure, you CAN have quote marks in Outlook 2003/2007 but you still have to trim the above lines to something more sane.

In Entourage you can even customise the attribution line and everything! Yet to do the same in Outlook you've got to use a third party utility (Outlook Quotefix) to be able to do it.

So I ask Microsoft for the nine-hundreth time - just WHEN are you going to introduce facilities for sensible quoting in your Windows mail client? You've proven it can be done with Entourage, so why not Windows?

M.