Entourage instability and dysfunction

[APR]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel Email Client: Exchange ISSUE--I began to have trouble last week with Entourage. All of a sudden, it quit receiving email. I have had this happen once before; hence I new the fix--purge the folder cache. For good measure I compacted the DBs. Nothing has been the same since.

CRASHES--The application now crashes every other time while saving attachments--before it was more intermittent, say a weekly occurrence when I forgot to add a 3-letter extension to a mail text.

SLOWDOWN--The sending of mail can now be interminable. The machine just sits there and grinds. On occasion, opening the sent-items folder and clicking on the email gets it sent. Other times, not.

SEARCH DYSFUNCTION--The search fields no longer work. ou type something in and there is no corresponding filtering actions. Hitting return does not help.

IDENTITY DYSFUNCTION--The application also mysteriously clones main windows. Sometimes it it two or three. Other times it is five or six. They are all perfectly superimposed, so you only find out by pulling down the window menu.

REMEDIATION TO DATE--All of this began on Leopard. No other applications have shown problems. Over the weekend, I decided to see if upgrading the OS would help. I am now on Snow Leopard. No dice. Problems persist.

RIG--I am using a three-year old MacBook Pro that has 3 gigs of RAM. I have checked the logs, and the crashes are not producing any. There is a crash report for QuickLook that happened shortly before the mayhem began. I am not sure if that was the cause or if an Apple update caused the problem. I had not added apps or messed with the system.

Thanks for any assistance that you can offer. I will also send this to the MS Feedback link.

 

[Diane Ross]

RESULTS--Entourage came back to life, though very pokey. The searches now work
but take about 30 seconds; hence no lightning fast Sherlocks. Most mail opens.
However, so far, I have found one email that will not open at all. Clicking on
it sends the application back into spinning-wheel mode. The only exit is a
force quit. I have run the DB utility again to see if fleas remain. It reports
back uncorrupted DBs. It did the same before Entourage finally quit working.
Clearly, it it is missing something.

Often rebuilding does nothing but give you the opportunity to export your
data from an Identity that would not open so you can import it in a new
Identity. If you have the original database before you rebuilt, I would use
it. I've seen rebuilds destroy some data.

How to manually move your data. (when import fails and/or you need to move
to a new Identity same version or revert to an older version)

OTHER APPS--MS Word is now imploding without warning when doing simple things,
like hitting return, switching views, etc. I do not know if this is related to
the Entourage problems, as it could well be a result of the upgrade from
Leopard to Snow Leopard. (I recall seeing complaints about resulting
instability; hence my reluctance to upgrade.)

Microsoft fonts to delete after installing Snow Leopard (includes help
deleting font caches)

NEXT STEPS--In sum, problems are slightly alleviated but not fixed, and I
soldier on. I am now wondering if an email regimen change has led to my
situation. My Exchange mailbox used to be unlimited, so I had three years
worth of mail, equal to 17 gigs. I am now two months under an IT director that
thinks that email is like snail mail where 'no one keeps mail in the mailbox.'
(Obvious and overwhelming counter arguments have not prevailed.) Hence I am
now ditching mail from Exchange weekly. Since I need all of it daily--mail
being a poor man's KM system--I am storing it in local folders. Thus,
Entourage is now loading nine separate folders that collectively have a lot of
mail. The main identity was 21.43 gigs before compaction. It is now 10.26 gigs
and not working well.

You might look at exporting your data into Eagle Filer or DEVONthink Pro
Office. This would help keep your database smaller. You are getting into the
overly large size. Both can be searched with Spotlight.

DEVONthink Pro Office is 20% off right now.
<http://tinyurl.com/yejpmlj>

EagleFiler
<http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/>

If you own FileMake Pro there are add-ons that will also import your email,
but are quite expensive.

---Wasted Space---
The database will be left with 'wasted' space in it every time you delete
something. However, this is not all bad, since the wasted space is used up
with new data as it is added. This way, over a period of time (assuming that
you are deleting stuff as you go) the database will probably reach an
optimum size, after which the stuff you delete is roughly equal to the stuff
you add, and no further growth takes place.

How to determine how much wasted space you have. Under File > Export, export
all items as Entourage archive (.rge) file (this is the default action).
Compare the size of the database to the .rge file. The difference is wasted
space.

Tip: I find that exporting as .rge is a better validator of your database
than the database utility and you get a backup of your data in the process.

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
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