Well, Corentin, I've become increasingly disillusioned with Entourage: I
need to regularly rebuild the database (which recovers not "everything," but
everything that "can be" recovered...and often then requires that I spend a
lot of time culling the results to eliminate duplicate messages);
There might be something badly corrupted in your database.
I know it's a major pain, but you might consider exporting everything
you can to an archive, create a new identity and reimport it all (and
re-enter the account settings, rules, mailing list management,
schedules... I know :-\ ).
I exclusively use IMAP and Exchange accounts. When I need to archive
things, I use EagleFiler.
I therefore don't have the same problems. If something gets ugly, I can
create a new identity and ask Entourage to get all the e-mails from the
servers again.
I don't really want to rely on the On My computer section too much for
various reasons, (backing-up being one of them as you pointed out
below).
I've never
been able to create a set of rules that works the way I'd like; and
(perhaps most annoying), I can't _reliably_ back up my system without first
stopping all work to quit Entourage (and, I recently discovered, _all_ of
the Office products and their associated apps). And since my SuperDuper! and
Time Machine back-up routines are set up to run automatically on independent
schedules, I've set up a series of Growl alerts to remind me to quit all
running MS apps ahead of each scheduled backup. In all likelihood, I'll soon
incorporate them into an Automator workflow I've been using (similar to
Diane's) to work around the "Entourage-Time Machine" problem.
Yeah, for SuperDuper! you can ask SD to run a shell script quitting
them all before performing the backup.
You could even have a post-run script relaunch Entourage after it's done.
But really, should all of this be happening -- and should all of this be
necessary -- in a well-designed app? Quite frankly, this appears to be one
of the busiest newsgroups on the 'net, chock full of folks constantly
beleaguered with problems, forced to rely _not_ on MS, but on extremely
talented volunteers like yourself, Diane, et al., for assistance, often
requiring creative "workarounds" reminiscent of Rube Goldberg solutions.
There have been numerous discussions on the pros and cons of this type
of databases, for Entourage and other applications.
Most of the time, as I can recall, people in favor of databases pointed
out performances and the fact that a file-based design didn't allow for
some complex tasks like tagging, links, etc (though I'm not so sure
it's accurate when I see the OpenMeta project).
In other words: I'm with you on this one, but clearly, it's not in my hands :->
The only thing that Entourage has going for it (from my perspective) is a
familiar interface that is relatively easy to navigate, plus the ability to
access newsgroups. The field of alternative email clients and newsreaders is
rather anemic, otherwise I probably would've dumped Entourage a while ago.
But at this point, I'm seriously considering moving to Mail.app (which I
don't like) plus MacSoup (which, though dated, I do like).
MacSoup is a GREAT nntp client. It's dated user interface and
limitations are the only things pushing me to look around for alternate
options. I had great hopes with Nemo (too buggy at this point). I am
currently playing around with Unison 2.0. Not too bad, but still not as
powerful as MacSoup.
I miss the graphical representation of the threads (but it has a
semi-threaded view) and the auto-tagging of threads I posted in (they
say it's in the works).
As far as Mail is concerned, it's a different story: I use Entourage AND Mail.
Entourage is still the best Exchange client out there as far as I am
concerned and has a bunch of unique features you don't see anywhere
else.
Mail is somewhat limited, but add-ons like MailTags and Mail Act-On can
turn it into a powertool! I use Mail *because* of these two add-ons!
Quite frankly, I'd rather not migrate, but putting up with Entourage is
becoming an "increasingly increasing" operational burden. And, to add insult
to injury, it is relatively costly.
I feel you pain :-\
Corentin
).