Archive mail from a project

[Michael Carlisle]

Using Entourage 2008 12.1.2 -
I¹m trying to archive all the mail related to a project (8000+ messages).
I followed the ³Help² entry which says in part:

Tip To quickly export a copy of all e-mail messages that are part of a
project, click Mail , and then in the folder list, click the project and
drag it to the desktop.
The project's mail box is saved on your desktop as an MBOX file with an
..mbox extension.

However I keep getting any empty document (i.e. Zero KB).
Any thoughts anyone?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Michel Bintener]

I'm not sure why you keep getting an empty file.

Have you tried creating an archive? Use File>Export and export all the items
that belong to your project. These archives can be imported back into
Entourage whenever you want to.

Using Entourage 2008 12.1.2 -
I¹m trying to archive all the mail related to a project (8000+ messages).
I followed the ³Help² entry which says in part:

Tip To quickly export a copy of all e-mail messages that are part of a
project, click Mail , and then in the folder list, click the project and drag
it to the desktop.
The project's mail box is saved on your desktop as an MBOX file with an .mbox
extension.

However I keep getting any empty document (i.e. Zero KB).
Any thoughts anyone?

Thanks,
Mike

--
Michel Bintener
Microsoft MVP
Office:mac (Entourage & Word)

*** Please always reply to the newsgroup. ***

 

[Dan Dixon]

Did you make a rule that actually moves emails associated with the project
into that folder, or are you manually moving them in there? If not, there
won¹t be any emails in it, even if you are assigning the emails to the
project from the Projects menu within the message or message list.

Dan

 

[Michael Carlisle]

I've tried the export function, however there doesn't appear to be a way to
select an individual folder to export. Entourage tries to export ALL of my
mail, not just the specific project folder.

I like Entourage, but there sure are a lot of Outlook features I miss.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Michael Carlisle]

I had to manually create the applicable folders and move all the messages,
some of them are marked as part of the project ­ some aren¹t.
Unfortunately, the messages frequently dealt with multiple subjects or
projects, so single tagging wouldn¹t have worked.
I had to duplicate quite a few messages so I could put them in multiple
project folders.
I suppose I could try a bulk tagging of everything in the messages folder of
that project.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Dan Dixon]

I also manually tag emails for projects since I often have multiple projects
running for the same client(s) and people's email subjects are all over the
place. But that's not really the issue, if I'm understanding you correctly.

As I understand your problem, there are 8000 emails for a given project in
one folder in your "Folders on My Computer" list, correct? But when you drag
that folder to your desktop, you get a file with zero K size?

If so, I don't know what to tell you since that shouldn't happen.

Dan

 

[Michael Carlisle]

I thought about this for awhile. All the messages are NOT in one folder.
They're in many folders, all of which are in one folder.
So I did a help search on "subfolders" and got this:
not exported. You must drag the subfolders to the desktop individually.***

Well, dragging about 150 folders individually to the desktop would not only
be onerous, but defeat the purpose of having a single archive.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Diane Ross]

Well, dragging about 150 folders individually to the desktop would not only
be onerous, but defeat the purpose of having a single archive.

These scripts get subfolders.

Archive Message Folders By Jolly Roger
<http://jollyroger.kicks-ass.org/ArchiveMessageFolders.zip>

This script archives each folder in your Entourage folder list to a folder
on your desktop named "Entourage Archives". The script preserves the
hierarchy of the folders, as they exist in the Entourage folders list, by
creating sub-folders in the "Entourage Archives" folder that correspond to
the sub-folders in Entourage. The exported MBOX files have the same name as
the folders in Entourage, with the exception that forward slash characters
(/) are replaced with dash characters (-) to avoid problems with the Mac OS
X file system.

Export Folders By: Barry Wainwright
<http://scriptbuilders.net/files/exportfolders1.1.html>

This script will archive ALL your Entourage mail folders as MBOX files
(standard UNIX mailbox format) to a folder on the desktop. It will also
(optionally) set the file type to TEXT so that they can be recognized by
applications other than Entourage.

This script does not preserve the hierarchy of the folders. If you have
subfolders with the same name, it will be hard to distinguish.

I don't believe you can select a specific subset of folder with the first
script. I do know that Barry's script is all folders. Jolly's script is new
and I have not yet had the opportunity to test it out.

If a folder does have corruption, the script will fail at that folder.
Again, I'm not sure if Jolly's script has the same behavior.

Hope this helps!

 

[Dan Dixon]

I don't store project emails in a single project folder either, which is why
I assign projects to messages manually. The messages then show up in the
relevant project module, and I can archive all emails for a specific project
together. You can even assign the same email to several projects, e.g., when
an email addresses more than one project.

To archive email or other project items, use the "Backup" button in the
project overview tab. It lets you specify what items in the project to back
up: mail, tasks, calendar events, files, etc. It will also give you the
option of deleting archived items from Entourage if you want.

I realize this may not be practical for you if you have not already assigned
all of the emails to a project, in which case those scripts Diane mentioned
may work better. I thought I'd mention it in case you might want to consider
using my method in the future.

Dan

 

[Diane Ross]

One other thought. If you assign categories to all messages in a folder to
associate it with a particular project, you could then create a custom view
for that category and drag that to the desktop. If you wanted to drag
several subfolders as one big folder, then assign a general category
"project" to all messages and then a sub-category like "project_123" to the
individual messages. This would allow you to resort all messages quickly.

 

[Michael Carlisle]

Thanks Diane, I'll give these a try.

 

[Michael Carlisle]

Thanks Dan.
You know it never even occurred to me to try and assign more than one
project to an email...

I suppose if I ever took the time to actually read a manual....