Alll those mails after rebuild... .:-(

[Jonny]

Hi,

I love Entourage. I have version 11.2.5 (060620) on Mac OS 10.4.9

But it has a "feature" that is bugging my butt off.

When rebuilding database, lots of old mails suddenly appears here and
there in various folders. Just now, I rebuild and when I launched it
again, I had about 400 mails in the junk folder which I had to go
through again.

Mails that are 2-3 weeks old (or even older sometimes) suddenly shows up
in the inbox or in different folders, and I can't just delete them but
have to check that they aren't clones of already saved mails. If they're
in fact the "originals", I have to put them where I want them again.

All this causes a nagging feeling that Entourage might not save every
single mail after rebuild. I am often worried that some important mails
won't be there any longer...

Are there any remedy for this?

Cheers,
Jonny

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

I love Entourage. I have version 11.2.5 (060620) on Mac OS 10.4.9

Ouch... We're now at 11.3.5. The updates brought security improvements
but also a lot of bug fixes..... It might be time to launch the
Microsoft Auto-Update…

Corentin

 

[Mickey Stevens]

That's a known side-effect of rebuilding the database. It happens because
messages that are deleted stay in the database until they are overwritten
with new data. In some cases, database corruption makes it unclear whether
a message is supposed to be deleted or not; the rebuild tool errs on the
side of caution and preserves the message. That's better than accidentally
losing data you might have wanted, I would think.

In any case, there's no reason to rebuild on a regular basis. It should
really only be done if you are experiencing symptoms of database corruption.
Otherwise, you'd be better off doing a "Compact" if you need to reclaim hard
drive space by shrinking the database.

 

[Diane Ross]

When rebuilding database, lots of old mails suddenly appears here and
there in various folders. Just now, I rebuild and when I launched it
again, I had about 400 mails in the junk folder which I had to go
through again.

Mails that are 2-3 weeks old (or even older sometimes) suddenly shows up
in the inbox or in different folders, and I can't just delete them but
have to check that they aren't clones of already saved mails. If they're
in fact the "originals", I have to put them where I want them again.

All this causes a nagging feeling that Entourage might not save every
single mail after rebuild. I am often worried that some important mails
won't be there any longer...

Are there any remedy for this?

You don¹t mention if this is a POP or IMAP account. If POP....

Do you leave mail on the server? After a rebuild, Entourage will download
messages left on the server.

You can use ³online account² option under Advanced in Accounts to view mail
on the server. You can also select to download all mail left on the server.

Ditto on Corentin's recommendation to update.
--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
One of the top five MS Entourage resources listed on the Entourage Blog.
<http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/>

 

[Jonny]

Thanks all for replies.

Will get latest update.

Yes, it's POP accounts and leaving no copies on server.

Cheers,
Jonny

 

[Pitch]

Here's what I do when I think I need to rebuild the Entourage
database: temporarily remove all my emails from the Inbox (just drag
them to a folder on the Finder). Once the rebuild is done, Entourage
tosses often a thousand or more emails (from POP server, and/or old
deleted mail, doesn't really matter). Once it's done doing that, I
simply delete the entire Inbox. Because I don't want them in my
Deleted Items folder either, I use the Delete Completely script. After
that, I bring back the saved emails back into my Inbox. I generally
run a close-to-zero count in my Inbox, but there's still 15 or so that
I haven't processed, and this method saves me a ton of time searching
for them amidst 1000 old unwanted emails after the rebuild.