Slow Entourage performance after Exchange mailbox move

[Paul Smith]

I'm having problems with Entourage 2004 running slow after their Exchange
mailboxes were moved to a new Exchange server within the administrative
group. After doing some research, I discovered that this is a known issue
with the way the mailbox move function works. It converts the messages that
were stored in MIME format for Entourage to MAPI format, which requires the
Exchange server to do a lot of extra processing whenever the converted
messages are accessed. Exchange does this on-the-fly after the mailbox move
- the information store is never updated. Some of our users have large
mailboxes of historical messages that they refer to often, so this has caused
a major issue. The server can slow to a crawl when more than a few people
are in Entourage.

I have only found 2 documents discussing this issue, and neither of them
completely resolved the problem. It sounds like once the old messages are
converted to MAPI, there's no going back. I'm wondering if there is ANY way
to improve the performance of Entourage when accessing these converted
messages, beyond the Microsoft recommendations. For instance, is there any
way to reconvert the MAPI messages back into MIME? Perhaps a 3rd party
utility?

Here are the details of our network:
2 Exchange 2003 SP2 servers running on Windows 2003 SP2
Mac clients run Entourage 2004 11.3.3
The Macs are running OS X 10.4.8
We also have PCs running Outlook 2003, although they are running fine

These are the documents I've found detailing the problem and some suggested
fixes, in case they can help anyone else:

http://blogs.technet.com/amir (see entry on Content Conversion Issue with
Exchange and Entourage)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329067

 

[William Smith]

I'm having problems with Entourage 2004 running slow after their Exchange
mailboxes were moved to a new Exchange server within the administrative
group. After doing some research, I discovered that this is a known issue
with the way the mailbox move function works. It converts the messages that
were stored in MIME format for Entourage to MAPI format, which requires the
Exchange server to do a lot of extra processing whenever the converted
messages are accessed. Exchange does this on-the-fly after the mailbox move
- the information store is never updated. Some of our users have large
mailboxes of historical messages that they refer to often, so this has caused
a major issue. The server can slow to a crawl when more than a few people
are in Entourage.

I have only found 2 documents discussing this issue, and neither of them
completely resolved the problem. It sounds like once the old messages are
converted to MAPI, there's no going back. I'm wondering if there is ANY way
to improve the performance of Entourage when accessing these converted
messages, beyond the Microsoft recommendations. For instance, is there any
way to reconvert the MAPI messages back into MIME? Perhaps a 3rd party
utility?

Hi Paul!

I've never heard of this procedure and problem before. Very interesting.

I'm assuming that all new messages are in the non-MAPI format, correct?
If so, this may be a drastic solution but you could probably download
all your messages to your Macs, erase them from the server and then copy
the downloaded messages back to the server. Of course, if your folks
have a lot of reference material then this could take quite a while. Be
sure to test with a few messages to make sure date/time stamps are
preserved or can be corrected.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>