I want to be able to tell Entourage to only sync mail that's been sent or received in the last n days, e.g., 7 days. There are a lot of reasons one might want to do this, but here are a few:
- You primarily use a desktop machine for e-mail, but you want to use a laptop for secondary access. However, you don't want Entourage taking time to maintain full-sync with your large mail store.
- If that same secondary machine should end up in the wrong hands, you want to minimize the security impact by not unnecessarily storing more information on there than is necessary.
- You're using Entourage as part of an automated workflow that includes e-mail processing, and you want the system to deal with as little mail as possible.
That's with Exchange, but this would also be extremely useful for POP or IMAP. For instance, I have a Gmail account with which Entourage is completely useless, simply because even if I were to let it go the several days it would require to download even just the headers of everything, Entourage's database would utterly choke on that volume of mail. (I hate to say it, but this is one of those cases where the old Eudora is still far superior to any modern mail client - it easily handled archives of millions of messages without the slightest slow-down.) Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the POP protocol doesn't support anything like this, though I don't have a clue about IMAP.
As an aside, I think I remember seeing an option like this in Outlook on Windows, though I don't have a machine handy to verify that right now.
