Comments and questions from a new Entourage switcher

Question

When Leopard came out, I decided to take the plunge and move from 7 years of Entourage-ing over to the whole Mail/Address Book/iCal/.mac combo.
It's been a challenge, and one I'm glad I'm making. I really see the future lies here, especially with all the great GTD tools (like OmniFocus) that are so well integrated into these Mac apps.
I have a bunch of things that I'd like to ask or comment on, that I've collected since the switch. I hope these don't sound like whining. More, it's really to stimulate conversation in these areas to find out if anyone has found workarounds, add-on utilities, or even if I'm not doing something right.
*1. Checking If They're Already In Address Book.* If I get an email from someone, I like to know if they're already in my Address Book. In Entourage, you'd right-click, select "Add to Address Book" and if they were already in there, a window would pop up, saying, "This already exists, would you like to add to it, or just open the contact". In Mail, there's no such checking, so clicking on "Add to Address Book" can end up duplicating and triplicating what's already there. In other words, I'm looking for a quick way to open up that person's contact info.
Oddly enough, sometimes a right-click on someone's email address, who is already in ones Address Book, will bring up an "Open in Address Book." However, it's extremely inconsistent. My own brother's emails don't work like that. But odd companies, whom I rarely get email from, will show it.
*3. No Categories.* This is the biggest missing piece for me. If I get an email from someone that treats me with familiarity, but I don't recognize them, there's no way to go into my address book and tell what relationship I have with that contact. Client? Acquaintance? Purchaser? Relative I only met once? This is because there seems to be no way to attach a Category to each contact. Once you have over 2000 contacts, it becomes difficult to remember what each person or company is there for (we have over 5200). Which product did they purchase? Or are they a vendor. Someone I met at a party? Ex girlfriend? There is the Mail Group function, but those act more like Smart folders and aren't attached to the actual contact, so when viewing the All Contacts, there's no way of telling who's who. Even if there were simply a way to color each contact, those colors could act as a category, and one could sort by them. This is my major concern right now with Mail over Entourage. Here's hoping someone creates a utility that does just this!
*4. No Easy Way to Copy Entire Address.* Every hour, we are copying addresses and pasting them into a customized DYMO label (that has our return address and company logo on it). There doesn't seem to be any way to grab the entire mailing address in one Copy. You can highlight/copy the address, street and zip, and paste that into, for instance, a Dymo label, but you have to go back and grab the name separately. The Print function has some very interesting ways to print (including to a plain default Dymo label), but since we have customized labels, we just need to copy the address ourselves.
*5. Search Function Blandness*. The search function could use more refinement. If you search for "Comcast," you logically get all of the contacts that have "comcast.com" in their email address (Further, if the word happens to be in the Notes field, it'll bring those up as well). But there should be a way where it gives precedent to the actual Comcast company contact—which the word "Comcast" in the company field—instead of being forced to scroll through hundreds of contacts to find the actual one I'm looking for.
*6. Auto Name Fill To Slow.* When entering names in an email name field, you can't go very fast, because Mail takes a couple of seconds or so to recognize the name you're typing. For instance, if I'm sending an email to Mark, and type Mar, Mail autofills the rest for "Mark Smith" but the spinning thingie is still spinning, and if I don't wait that extra second, and hit tab or Return, Mail just puts in an empty "Mar" without any email address. I have to wait until the spinning thingie stops before hitting tab or return. When entering 5 or 10 email addresses, this is a hassle. Often I find that even after the spinning thingie stops, and Mail looks like it has autofilled, if I click Tab or Return, the address often still didn't fill correctly. It only stopped at the 3 or 4 letters that I'd typed in. If I didn't catch the error, I think I've sent it, only to get an error message later on.
*7. iCal Alarm Window.* They forgot the lower right corner resize thing in the iCal Reminder window! And regardless of the number of alarms (I often have 20 or more), the green button is always grayed out. So if you have 20 or 30 iCal reminders, you can only view them one at a time in that small window, and have to use the up and down arrows. I'd like to be able to drag this window down so I can view all 20 at a time.
*8. Limited iChat Alarm Window Delay options.* If you want to delay (called "repeat" in iCal lingo) any to-do in the iCal Alarm window, you have options for 1 minute, 5, 15, and 30 minutes, 1 and 2 hours, 1 day and 1 week. It'd be great to if a hack were developed that allowed for other useful delays, such as "tomorrow morning" (so one can see everything all at once first thing in the morning), 2 days, 3 days, and 2 weeks. A "4 hours" would be handy as well, since that's like saying "bug me this afternoon."
Again, don't misinterpret this as whining, I'm digging the move and am totally committed to it. I just want to see if anyone has wondered about any of these, too, and has discovered a workaround (or a pref I'm not seeing!) or knows of a 3rd-party utility (or downright hack).
Thanks for any ideas on these.
Edit: corrected some misspellings...

Answer 1

Re: Categories - I too miss that and I've 'solved' it two different ways. First, I set up groups which helps me find someone who I know within a certain context. ie, I know I'm looking for John who is a student. I look in the student group for all the Johns. Second, I use the note entry to jot down things I want to remember about the person.