Empty Cache - known issues?

[dhiggs]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel
Email Client: Exchange

The users in my Mac Entourage/Exchange environment have to empty their cache on a regular basis.

There are two side effects I know of which are annoying, i'm wondering if these are known issues. If they are, i'm wondering why something so common can't be resolved by MS.

1) Any rules set to use folders on an exchange account will stop working. Emptying the cache will cause the rule to use similar folders on 'My Computer' rather than exchange.

Example: A rule set to move emails to deleted items (exchange) will change to deleted items (my computer) after the cache is cleared.

This makes it useless having many rules if you have to define the correct exchange folders again for each rule.

2) If Categories are used on an exchange based Calendar, and the cache is emptied, all categories will be lost.

What the hell! A feature like this should be disabled if it doesn't actually work with an exchange account.

Sorry if i've jumped to any conclusions, but Entourage is the biggest nightmare of my job for the last 18 months i've had to support it.

Running latest Office 2008 & Exchange 2003.

 

[Diane Ross]

The users in my Mac Entourage/Exchange environment have to empty their cache
on a regular basis.

Why they are having to empty cache on a regular basis.

Did you see the post today where I quoted a developer on flushing cache?

<quote>
I¹m troubled at the advise of flushing the cache for performance. The only
reason to flush the cache would be some type of corruption which this might
fix. I don¹t see any reason to expect any performance increase and given the
loss of data (links, category, project, rules and saved search information)
I would never recommend it for performance.

Any saved search that is referencing an Exchange folder is going to break
when/if you flush the Exchange account cache.

Flushing the cache is going to give the Spotlight index generator a lot of
work to do and it might take a while to catch up. That may be all the user
was seeing with the Spotlight problem. Rebuilding only this makes this worse
because now instead of re-indexing just the data refilling the cache, it has
to re-index everything. On the other hand if you have the patience to wait
for it to rebuild, there really isn¹t much downside to rebuilding the
index.</quote>

 

[dhiggs]

When users delete or move large amounts of emails, within minutes they'll get a response from the server stating that their credentials are incorrect. Generally it's because Entourage gets out of sync with the server and the only choice is to empty cache.

I did post this problem a while ago but had no answer.

I thought i would do some digging again and I saw this blog from August 2008 which exactly describes the issue we're seeing. I have submitted the solution to the server admins, i'm keen to try the solution. Link here:

<http://blogs.technet.com/amir/archi...entourage-connecting-to-exchange-mailbox.aspx>

Regardless of the reason why users are having to empty cache, losing categories and rule configuration when the cache is deleted is unacceptable. The software should be written to avoid things like this. If the info can't be stored on an exchange mailbox, or in the least locally in a safe manner, then what's the point? I have users who spend a great deal of time trying to make their mail account work for them. It doesn't help when they can't rely on the tools that are given to them.

Let's hope that Entourage for Exchange Web Services will be a big improvement. This product should have made it's debut with Office 2008. I just noticed that it says categories will be supported too.