Entourage acting wonky
Okay, I'm not one to rely on Entourage for my email needs, but my mother has to. Unfortunately, as soon as you start relying on an MS application for anything, it comes and stabs you in the back.
The reason she relies on it is because a number of her clients simply can't open the attachments she sends when using Mail.app. They get the attachment, but they are unable to open it. Sometimes they can't read the email at all when sending with Mail. My mom thinks it has something to do with some of her clients using very old systems using Windows 95 or 98, but she has tried a number of things. She's checked the "send windows friendly attachments" box and she always makes sure she has the right file extensions, but the same problem happens with about 1/3 of her clients.
So, she uses Entourage. It sucks, but it always works right when sending attachments. Everything was fine until a couple days ago, when it started doing this:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~resc0030/screenie.jpg
The inbox has the pinstriped background. When deleting messages, especially when trying to remove the last message from the list, it will give her that error message. It also happens at random intervals. She has no idea what causes it, but it makes it very hard to work. When receiving messages, she says, sometimes the inbox window will look normal for a while, but as the messages are received, it starts doing the pinstripe thing again, and then it gives that error. Also, it isn't as bad in the other folders. As long as she can get the messages to another folder, she can work with them fine. It's just the inbox that is messed up.
Sorry I couldn't describe the problem better. This is what happens when you try to get your mother to tell you how a computer is behaving. Anyway, I am thinking that reinstalling Entourage might work, but even I don't know how to do it while preserving all her emails.
These are my options:
Get Mail.app working with everyone
Fix Entourage somehow
Reinstall Entourage while preserving her emails
Use a different client - by the way, she has tried Eudora and she hates it, can't work with it.
Also, I have installed the updates. They were installed after the problem occurred, but they didn't fix it. The problem first started happening about three days ago, and it wasn't associated with any sort of change to her system. Any help please?
The reason she relies on it is because a number of her clients simply can't open the attachments she sends when using Mail.app. They get the attachment, but they are unable to open it. Sometimes they can't read the email at all when sending with Mail. My mom thinks it has something to do with some of her clients using very old systems using Windows 95 or 98, but she has tried a number of things. She's checked the "send windows friendly attachments" box and she always makes sure she has the right file extensions, but the same problem happens with about 1/3 of her clients.
So, she uses Entourage. It sucks, but it always works right when sending attachments. Everything was fine until a couple days ago, when it started doing this:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~resc0030/screenie.jpg
The inbox has the pinstriped background. When deleting messages, especially when trying to remove the last message from the list, it will give her that error message. It also happens at random intervals. She has no idea what causes it, but it makes it very hard to work. When receiving messages, she says, sometimes the inbox window will look normal for a while, but as the messages are received, it starts doing the pinstripe thing again, and then it gives that error. Also, it isn't as bad in the other folders. As long as she can get the messages to another folder, she can work with them fine. It's just the inbox that is messed up.
Sorry I couldn't describe the problem better. This is what happens when you try to get your mother to tell you how a computer is behaving. Anyway, I am thinking that reinstalling Entourage might work, but even I don't know how to do it while preserving all her emails.
These are my options:
Get Mail.app working with everyone
Fix Entourage somehow
Reinstall Entourage while preserving her emails
Use a different client - by the way, she has tried Eudora and she hates it, can't work with it.
Also, I have installed the updates. They were installed after the problem occurred, but they didn't fix it. The problem first started happening about three days ago, and it wasn't associated with any sort of change to her system. Any help please?
Comments
Entourage uses a monolithic database that occasionally gets corrupted and needs to be rebuilt. You can find instructions here .
Also, does your mom have a *lot* of mail? Entourage used to have a database limit of 2 GB, which is now increased to 4GB with the latest updates. Around those limits, it has been known to act erratically.
Come to think of it, as a Microsoft Mac product, it has been known to act erratically on a random basis out of spite.
If a reinstall should prove necessary, go look in her Users/Documents folder and find the folder called "Microsoft User Data." Inside that is another folder called "Office X Identifies." Inside that are folders for each Entourage "identity." If she never renamed her identity, there will be one folder called "Main Identity" -- that's what you need to preserve. It contains her Database, Database Cache, Mailing Lists, Rules and Signatures. (At least, that's what mine contains.) The Database is what contains all of her e-mails, contacts, calendar items, etc. Make a copy of this entire directory somewhere OTHER than the Microsoft User Data folder. After reinstalling, replace it back into that folder, keeping the same hierarchy and the same file and folder names.
Now I have to find out how to try to block all this spam she gets... my mom's email address is fairly old and it has now been totally swamped with spam. And I mean SWAMPED. She gets over 500 junk mails a day. Really.
I'm not sure how to deal with it. I was thinking I could tell her to have Mail.app running, and using IMAP, and then when she wanted to send messages to people she could open Entourage and send it through that. Entourage's spam filtering is a sad excuse for a five-year-old junk filter. It has never been updated by Microsoft. Just one of the many reasons why I hate it, but unfortunately Mail doesn't send working attachments with many people.
Any other recommendations? I was thinking perhaps Thunderbird could do the job - it also has adaptive junk mail filtering, and it will probably send Windows-friendly attachments since it's cross platform. But I don't want my mom to rely too heavily on beta software.
Check it out here.
Disclaimer: I don't use SpamSieve because I find Mail's spam filter is fine for my needs. But if I needed an industrial-strength filter, this would be the one I'd use.