More Address Book Weirdness

[Muskie]

I have 2000+ contacts in my Mac's address book. So when I started a
new job which uses Exchange I did not want to give this up because I
make custom groups. I read how if I made Entourage my default client
I could right click on the groups name and send a message to all
members but something weird is happening. The message is going to
people that are not in the group.

For instance I have three groups, one members of our board, and one
for two different advisory councils. When I sent a message today to
one advisory council it went to me and apparently every member of our
staff. I sent another message to the other advisory council, same
thing. I'm not even sure if the message is going to the people in the
list. I tried to view the headers but in 2007 Microsoft Outlook
neither I nor another staff member could tell who actually got the
message, even when replying all. It says "BOB Construction Cluster"
which is the name of my group on my Mac's address book on their
computer, but they can't see who it is from.

How am I suppose to send a message quickly to a predetermined list of
contacts? Especially since I already carefully built this list in
Address book. In my preferred mail client MailSmith I can just type
the groups name in the To: field and MailSmith knows I want to email
all the members of that group in my Address book.

I'm really not enjoying using Entourage!

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Your question is very confusing--you don't say what version you are
talking about, which is crucial, and what you describe leaves a lot of
holes where problems could have happened.

Yes, it is possible to set up a Group in Entourage, type the name of the
group into the To field, and easily send it. I do it all the time,
although it's conceivable it works differently with Exchange accounts (I
wouldn't know about that).

Note that the Apple app Address Book is not the same thing as Entourage.
Entourage keeps its own Address Book. It's really not clear from your
message whether you ever moved the groups from AB to Entourage, either
by syncing or manually. Making Entourage the default email client
doesn't do anything to set it up so you can actually use it.

So--first step--when you go into the address book module in Entourage,
do you actually see your named groups listed there? When you
double-click a group to show the list of names, is it correct?

If yes, second step--try this tip from Ed Kimball to see if the group
behaves when you create a message:

"Is "Don't show addresses when sending to a group" checked on that group? If
so (and you can tolerate all the members of the group seeing each others'
addresses), uncheck it and see if Entourage expands it properly. (You could
even try Work Offline and Send Later, then check the expanded address list
if you don't want everyone to see all the addresses.)"

 

[Diane Ross]

Note that the Apple app Address Book is not the same thing as Entourage.
Entourage keeps its own Address Book. It's really not clear from your
message whether you ever moved the groups from AB to Entourage, either
by syncing or manually. Making Entourage the default email client
doesn't do anything to set it up so you can actually use it.

To add to this... Entourage and Apple's Address Book don't see groups in the
same way. You will need to set up your groups in Entourage correctly.

Since you have so many contacts, I understand that groups are very
important. See these details on how to create tab delimited files for your
groups. You can also set each group with a category to indicate that group.

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/import_export/contacts.html#import_contacts>

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/import_export.html>

 

[Muskie]

To add to this... Entourage and Apple's Address Book don't see groups in the
same way. You will need to set up your groups in Entourage correctly.

Since you have so many contacts, I understand that groups are very
important. See these details on how to create tab delimited files for your
groups. You can also set each group with a category to indicate that group..

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/import_export/contacts.html#import_cont...>

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/import_export.html>

My groups were in Apple's Address Book. I'm using Office 2004 and
10.4.11. I recreated the groups in Entourage and now it works... But
why did I have to recreate the groups?

 

[Diane Ross]

My groups were in Apple's Address Book. I'm using Office 2004 and
10.4.11. I recreated the groups in Entourage and now it works... But
why did I have to recreate the groups?

Two different applications by two different companies that have their own
way of handling data. There are numerous examples of data that does not
transfer to another application. Cross platform issues are some of the
worst.