Entourage randomly freezes for a period

[main.dude]

Hi,

I'm running Entourage 2004 v 11.3.3 (061214) and it randomly freezes
for a few minutes. This always occurs when I select another item -
typically a mail message. The spinning beach ball appears and
Entourage locks up. The scheduled mail send/receive is not running at
this time and I don't synchronize entourage with anything. No Sync
services are selected in the Entourage preferences.

I'm running OS X 10.4.8 with 20GB free disk space and 2Gb of RAM.

This happens with no other programs running and seems to be unrelated
to whether I'm connected to the Internet or not.

I have rebuilt the database but it still occurs.

Any suggestions? It's getting very annoying and I may move to Macs
Mail if it cant be fixed.

Thanks for the help,

Andy W

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi,

I'm running Entourage 2004 v 11.3.3 (061214) and it randomly freezes
for a few minutes. This always occurs when I select another item -
typically a mail message. The spinning beach ball appears and
Entourage locks up. The scheduled mail send/receive is not running at
this time and I don't synchronize entourage with anything. No Sync
services are selected in the Entourage preferences.

I've seen that with:
1) huge Exchange accounts
2) huge projects with a ton of contacts and a ton of corresponding
e-mails
3) corrupted database (fix using the alt key as you launch the
application to trigger the database tool - categories are lost for
Exchange accounts - check the destination folders for rules and mailing
list manager aftwards).

I'm running OS X 10.4.8 with 20GB free disk space and 2Gb of RAM.

This happens with no other programs running and seems to be unrelated
to whether I'm connected to the Internet or not.

That could be Projects then. Do you use them??

Corentin

 

[main.dude]

Corentin,

Thank you very much for replying, but no I don't use Projects.

It is very odd behaviour. I rebuilt the database last night and
Entourage has not frozen since. While I do have a lot of mail I only
receive about 20 to 30 new e-mails per day and will only keep 10-15 of
these. I regularly empty the Deleted items folder.

I'm not sure if it's related but I have approximately 40 folders
and sub folders where I store my mail. I also have 6 rules that run to
process incoming mail.

Looking at other postings in this forum and on the Apple Discussion
boards it seems to be a common problem. I hope it gets fixed as I
quite like Entourage.

Thanks for your help,

Andy W

 

[Craig Roberts]

Dude,

What Mac are you using?

Can I harbour a guess it is Intel-based? I suffer the same thing (daily) on
my MacBook Pro 1.83GHz w/2GB RAM.

How much mail do you have in InBox and folders - right-click on Account name
and choose Folder Properties > Storage?

I have just under 1GB in my account total. We have users with up to 8GB. I
have not decided to limit account size and find out how to periodically
Archive mail.

Otherwise, we'll be moving people to Windows (

Regards
Craig.

 

[debbyj13]

What Mac are you using?

Can I harbour a guess it is Intel-based? I suffer the same thing (daily) on
my MacBook Pro 1.83GHz w/2GB RAM.

I'm not using an Intel-based Mac (I'm running OS 10.4.8 on an iMac G5),
and Entourage does it to me all the time. I've done the whole
"corrupted database" rebuild thing and it'll help for a time, but
usually within a few days I'm right back to where I was
before--spinning beach ball and twittling my thumbs while I wait. It
happens most often when my Mac has been put in sleep mode for the night
and then the following morning I go to check email. Microsoft
Entourage has to be the most finicky piece of software ever created.
If I didn't have so many important folders stored there, I'd switch to
Mac Mail in a heartbeat.
Debby J

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Corentin,

Thank you very much for replying, but no I don't use Projects.

It is very odd behaviour. I rebuilt the database last night and
Entourage has not frozen since. While I do have a lot of mail I only
receive about 20 to 30 new e-mails per day and will only keep 10-15 of
these. I regularly empty the Deleted items folder.

I'm not sure if it's related but I have approximately 40 folders
and sub folders where I store my mail. I also have 6 rules that run to
process incoming mail.

That shouldn't be an issue so much IMVHO.
One thing you could try is to add ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office
2004 Identities to your Spotlight Exclude list in the System PrefPanes.
It could be that spotlight it trying to index you database and inducing
this general slowdown.
(and it shouldn't affec anything since the database is too big to be
indexed anyway and Entourage has a different mechanism to provide
spotlight information for the e-mails and contacts).

Corentin

 

[Diane Ross]

I have just under 1GB in my account total. We have users with up to 8GB. I
have not decided to limit account size and find out how to periodically
Archive mail.

AutoArchive Exchange Account to "On My Computer"

Move all e-mail older than 60 days from your Exchange account folders to
archive folders within the "On My Computer" folder tree.

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/exchange/autoarchive.html>

--
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/>

 

[main.dude]

Hi,

I do indeed run an intel MacBook Pro with 2GB of memory and 20GB of
free disk space. I'd like to tell you how much mail I have, but I
can't find the 'Account Name' I need to right click on. Can you be
more specific please?

I noticed that under Entourage Preferences, Spotlight was ticked to
include items in Spotlight search results. I have unticked this to
see if the problem go's away.

Regards,

 

[Diane Ross]

I do indeed run an intel MacBook Pro with 2GB of memory and 20GB of
free disk space. I'd like to tell you how much mail I have, but I
can't find the 'Account Name' I need to right click on. Can you be
more specific please?

Rules, mailing lists, signatures, messages, address book, schedules,
contacts, tasks, notes, calendar are located in a database:

Entourage X and 2004 : ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office X
Identities/your identity

You can view the size of your database in the Finder.

I noticed that under Entourage Preferences, Spotlight was ticked to
include items in Spotlight search results. I have unticked this to
see if the problem go's away.

You need to disable the database from being searched by Spotlight. The
actual indexing is done from the files in

~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage

MUD needs to be removed from the Privacy list in Spotlight preferences. Drag
(drag rather than +) the Microsoft User Data folder into the Spotlight
Privacy window. Entourage uses have noticed slowdowns if Spotlight tries to
index the database which is unnecessary.

--
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/>