The Entourage User's WebLog

Owen Linzmayer wrote an excellent article pointing out the ten top things in Entourage he hated. I have to say that he's right on the money with these! the article is well researched, clealry written and not at all an example of the all too common 'Microsoft Bashing'.

Now I prefer using Entourage to all the other mail & PIM apps out there, and I could probably write (though maybe not as eloquently) a 'top ten hates' about Mail.app, Eudora, Powermail & Thunderbird, all of which I have used from time to time. Is Entourage perfect? Far from it! For my money, it's the best of the bunch, but they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. You, the user, have to make up your ownn list of priorities and decide which mail client best meets those needs.

So, why does Entourage have this many shortcomings? Don't the developers care? Is it a conspiracy on behalf of "Micro$haft" (sic) to kill the mac platform? I can state for a fact, that the developers do care. In the dealings I am privileged to have with them through being an MVP, I can testify to their commitment to Office for Mac and the Macintosh platform. The shortcomings are there because they have to continually trade off between the features they want to include and the resources they have available. You see, The MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit) is only a small group, but is has a reasonable degree of autonomy to put what they want into their products. However, they have to stand and fall by their own products and are expected to return a profit to the parent company - much like any large mutlinational organisation expects the same of it's product divisions. If the Macintosh market was as large as the windows office market then I am sure that the team would be just as large and well resourced as Office for Windows is. however, that isn't the real world and MacBU have to do what they can with the resources at their disposal. I for one think they do a terrific job.

So, thanks Owen Linzmayer for an excellent article. I hope it gets the coverage it deserves, because far from damaging entourage and the MacBU, I beleive that constructive criticism makes for a stronger product as the development team is spurred on to even greater efforts.

(Article edited 02/02/2006 to correct some glaring spelling errors!)

What do you think? Please use the 'comments' link below to let me know.

That is, when you reply to a mail, do you quote the original in your reply, and do you like your answer to go above the quoted text or after it?

Well, Entourage can do it either way. Take a look in the preferences, in the 'Reply and Forward' section. The first item is a check box to include the original message as quoted text in your reply. Check that, or uncheck it as you prefer. Most people have it checked.

Now, under the 'Attribution' part of this sections come your options for top & bottom posting. Confusion is going to arise here because replies to Newsgroup messages behave differently to replies to Mail messages.

Let's look at mail first:

These are the options to check in the mail attribution part of the preferences window

Option 1 - check "Use None"

Now, replying to a mail message gives you a window with the Quoted Text, then the cursor for your reply, then your signature (if you have one set).

Option 2 - check "Place reply text at top of message..."

Now a reply has things in this order: attribution line (you can modify what appears in this in the same preferences dialog); quoted text; cursor; signature

Option 2+ - also check the "Place insertion point before quoted text"

The order changes to cursor; attribution; quoted text; signature

Option 3 - check "Place reply at top of message and include From, Date..."

The order in a reply is now cursor; signature; short headers of the quoted message (over 5 lines); quoted text.

Nowhere is the preferred option for most top-posters: cursor; signature; short attribution line; quoted text.

News Messages

Things get even more confusing when we look at replies to newsgroup messages:
First, we note there is a separate section in the preferences for News Attribution, with just one editable entry for the attribution line. Now, doesn't this imply that the options just described have no effect on News? You'd think so, wouldn't you. Well, you're almost right. Options 1, 2 & 3 in the mail attribution section have no effect at all. the replies to news messages always contain: a short attribution line; the quoted text; the cursor; your signature.
However, select option 2+ in the mail attribution section and replies to news messages ARE affected - the order becomes: cursor; attribution; quoted text; signature. Crazy huh?

Note that again, there's no top-posters' preferred option.

The Solution

Before you despair, there is a simple solution. Paul Berkowitz has written an elegant set of scripts that let you customise your reply format a lot better than the Entourage Preferences. Using this script I have the Entourage preferences to reply to a message as a bottom poster: attribution; quoted text; cursor; signature. So, when I hit Cmd-R I get a bottom poster's reply. I have Paul's script set up to use the keyboard shortcut Cntl-Opt-R, and when I hit that I get a message in the top-poster's layout: cursor, signature; short attribution; quoted text.

Beautiful. The best of both worlds. Now why couldn't Microsoft have made it easier than they did?

"What's the 'Database Daemon'?" do I hear you ask?

Hardly surprising if you did, because users don't normally come across it. In fact, they're not meant to! A Daemon is a little application without a user interface that carries out some important maintenance task unseen to the user. Here's Wikipedia's definition.

The Database Daemon is a little utility that handles all the interaction with the Microsoft Office Database. It is the Daemon that writes mail into the database, extracts information from it for display etc. Every time you tell Entourage (or one of the other Office applications) to do something with the data, it asks the Daemon to do it. The Daemon was introduced in Entourage vX as a major enhancement to the stability and security of the database. Because it's a 'one trick pony', it is far easier to make it bug free than an application like Entourage, which has a thousand other functions. This gives the developers much more chance of writing the data to the database, or reading from it, without introducing any errors through bugs in their code.

The Daemon also keeps running after other office applications have been quit (if you have Notifications turned on in the Entourage preferences) so that you can get alerts from calendar events.

So, why do you need to worry about the Daemon? - Simple answer is that you don't. Need to worry, that is. However, there are circumstances where you may want to stop the Daemon. For example, you, being a good computer user, want to back up your Office Database. Now you may think it's a simple matter of copying the database to a CD, DVD or network location. However, what if the database is modified while you are in the middle of copying it? This is a definite possibility if the Daemon is still running. Also, all programmes write to disk by storing the data in a 'file buffer' - a portion of memory dedicated to this task - then when the buffer is full the data is written out in a stream of known size. It is possible that some changes (or even parts of some changes) may still be queued up in the file buffer within the Daemon and not written to the Database file on the disk. So, it is entirely possible that the copy of the database you have just taken for a back up could be corrupted! The simple solution is to quit the daemon first. This will cause the daemon to write all of it's data to disk first, and you also know that the daemon will not be modifying the database as you take your copy.

That's the theory, now how do you do it? There are several methods:

First, it's important that no other Office applications are running when you quit the daemon. They will crash otherwise.

• Open the application "Activity Monitor" (it lives in the /Applications/Utilities folder). If no window opens then choose 'Activity Monitor' from the Window menu.
  Type 'Daemon' (without the quotes) into the filter box, and select the Database Daemon in the short list of processes that will be left.
  Click the 'Quit' button in the toolbar.
  Click 'Quit Application' in the confirmation dialog that pops up
• Open Entourage and under the 'Entourage' menu select 'Turn Off Notifications'
  Quit Entourage and the daemon will quit as well (assuming you obeyed the instruction to previously quit all office apps).
• Run this Applescript:
  tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to quit

That's it

More tomorrow...

Here's a post from the newsgroups on a theme that appears at regular intervals:

How is it that there are addresses in Entourage that do not appear in the Address Book and that I cannot erase? They all appear as I start to type a name into a new message's address fields and have < at the beginning and > at the end. Also they have a little blue dot in front instead of the icon that looks like a game piece.

These addresses come from the 'Most Recently Used' (MRU) list - a list of addresses maintained by entourage from mail recently sent or received. They are there as an aid to quick addressing, so you can easily send a mail off to someone that you have exchanged mail with recently, whether or not their addresses are in your address book.

These addresses can be a problem, because the MRU list can also pick up addresses from received Spam, and you don't want to start sending mail off to those addresses!

So, what to do? You can turn off this feature in the preferences. Under the 'Compose' pane of the Mail & News preferences, there is a check box to "Display a list of recently used addresses...". Simply uncheck this box to turn the feature off entirely. There is also, in the same place, a button to completely erase the list of all addresses without turning the feature off. Press this button and the currently remembered messages will be forgotten, and Entourage will start building the list again.

Alternatively, if you want to erase individual addresses (if, for example, a freind has recently changed email addresses and you want Entourage to forget his old one), simply add the address to your address book, save it, then delete it - it will also be deleted from the MRU.

In addition, you can help Entourage to stop the list from gathering Spam addresses by use of the 'Junk' button. This, as well as marking the message as junk, will remove the address of the sender from the MRU.

Finally, if all this maintenance is too much, don't worry. the MRU is limited to 200 entries, and they are prioritised by frequency and how recent they were used. Any rogue addresses will eventually be filtered out of the bottom of the list as new addresses are gathered.

People coming to Entourage from other mail clients often ask if it's possible to make a hyper-link in an email message. They want more than just "http://www.apple.com" to show up, they want it to look like 'Apple'.

The trouble is, Entourage doesn't have a very sophisticated HTML editing engine, it's limited to fairly basic text mark-up stuff like font, colours, bolding & underlines. In order to create tables or hyper-links you need to create the HTML in a better editor. Way back when Paul Berkowitz wrote a script to do this - it took the HTML from a third party editor and created a message using that code - you couldn't edit the message in Entourage, but it could send it. This worked, but it was hardly straightforward.

Fortunately, with Office 2004, things got a lot easier. You can now create a message in word, complete with embedded images, tables, fancy formatting and, if you want, hyper-linked text. Just create the message you want to send as normal, then in Word, choose 'Send to ... Mail Recipient (As HTML)' from the File menu. This will transfer the Word document to an Entourage message window. You can't edit the doc any more, but you can address it and send it out.

Bingo! Hyper-links easily created.

The Holiday Season is almost upon us, a time for joy & festivity, a time to meet those far flung twigs of the family tree, a time to grab that picture of Great Uncle Arthur wearing a lob-sided paper crown, asleep on the settee after lunch!

Seriously though, I know I take far more pictures around Christmas time than at any other time of year. I also send and receive images to other friends and family members as well. What do you do when you get an email with 13 photos attached? Well, after I've finished cursing at the ease at which modern software lets people send multi-gigabyte emails nowadays, I simply click once on a menu item and the photos are magically copied to iPhoto where the comments field is populated with a tag to the message that they arrived in. Easy, efficient, effective.

What menu item do I click on? That would be my "Add JPEG to iPhoto" script. It's available as a free download from here.

Happy, Snappy Holidays

There's a couple of other resources maintained by MVPs around the web. Most comprehensive is probably the 'Entourage Help Pages' maintained by Diane Ross (with contributions from many other MVPs). J. E. McGimpsey has some general Office:Mac Topics pages - he's mainly focussed on Excel, but has some good tidBits in there. Mickey Stevens also has some useful information at his web pages.

Then there's the newsgroups at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups and the Entourage:mac mailing list.

For 'Official' help, see 'Mactopia' - the Microsoft web pages dedicated to Office for Mac.

That's pretty much it really - unless anyone out there knows of any other good resources that users can turn to in their hour of need. Let me know if you do.

We've probably all received them. You send an email to someone and get a little message back that says "Bill is out of the office until the end of the week, if you message was urgent please contact Betty on 1234-56789". Ever wished to set one up? It's pretty easy really.

There's two basic methods: Server-Side and Client-Side. Server-Side rules have the advantage that they continue to work and respond to incoming mail even if your own computer is not switched on. But they have to be provided by your mail server and aren't available to everyone. If you are using Entourage to connect to an Exchange Server, you can set up Server Side Rules (including OoF† rules) on the server, but you can't do this from Entourage, you need to connect to the server through a web browser using Outlook Web Access to configure it. If Entourage 2004 is working with Exchange, then the server has OWA turned on. You need to ask your IT Admin how to access the OWA server.

Client-Side vacation rules can be set up on your own computer. You do need to leave your computer running and make sure a schedule is collecting and sending mail at regular intervals though - a vacation rule won't run unless Entourage is collecting the mail!

If you are completely new to using Rules in Entourage, check out this page first.

Set up a rule that looks like this:

Important points to note are: Make sure the 'Execute' selector is set to "if ALL criteria..."; the first selection criterion is "Is Not from a Mailing List"; The second selection Criterion is "Is In Address Book". The first is critical. OoF responders sent to mailing lists annopy the heck out of a lot of people and can, in the worst case, cause a mail loop because you keep rersponding to your own vacation Notice!. The second is optional. Using it will cause the rule to respond only to those people in your address book. this prevents answers going back to spammers, but they generally use fake addresses anyway.

Now click on the 'Reply Text...' button and type the text of the reply to send to each person who mails you.

That's the basics, but if you want to refine things a little, you can make sure that each person who mails you gets only one response. Do it this way:

1. In the Address Book, set up a new group called "Vacation Rule"
2. Add a third Selection Criteria to your vacation Rule that says "Sender is not in Group 'Vacation Rule'"
3. Add a second Action to your Vacation Rule to add the sender of a received message to the Address Book Group "Vacation Rule"

Now, before sending off a Vacation Notice, the rule will check to see if it has already sent one. If it does send a notice it will add the sender to the address book group you created in step 1. This also gives you a quick and easy way to see all the people who tried to contact you while the rule was running.

Don't forget to turn the rule off and empty this group when you come back from your holiday though!

† Ever wondered why an Out Of Office rule is sometimes called an OoF rule? Its because OoF was the terminology used within Microsoft when the technology was being developed. It stand for Out Of Facility.

Ever wished that Entourage could do more? Ever found yourself repeat the same steps over and over again?

Well, we Mac users have a great tool called 'Applescript' - you've probably heard of it! Us Entourage users are doubly fortunate in that the Office for Mac developers have built in some extremely comprehensive applescript support. better yet, that task you want to automate has probably already been scripted! there are dozens of scripters out there who have written scripts for Entourage already (I've done a few myself), and many of them have made their creations available to any Entourage user free of charge.

Bookmark the list of Entourage scripts at Scriptbuilders.net and see if there's anything there that takes your fancy...

This is probably the most common solution to problems reported in the mailing lists.

Background

Entourage stores many different types of data: emails, contacts, calendar events, tasks, notes, links, categories, projects and various other stuff as well. To improve the interaction and linking between the various elements in Entourage (and externally to Messenger, Word & Excel) the Microsoft developers took the decision way back in the early days to store all this information in one large, central database. This database can be found in the folder named after your identity ("Main Identity" by default) in the "Office 2004 Identities" subfolder^† of the "Microsoft User Data" folder in your 'Documents' folder. It can grow quite large. Mine is currently a little over 3Gb. I have heard of people exceeding 4Gb (which used to be a hard size limit in earlier versions of Office). For most people, around 1Gb seems to be a common size.

† This refers, obviously, to Office 2004. Earlier versions of Office have differently named Identity folders

The Database Utility

Now, occasionally, this data store can become corrupted. With each release of Office (even with each Service Pack and minor 'dot release') the database becomes more stable, more reliable and more robust. Microsoft has built in the tools to repair the database in the event that corruption does occur and, new in Office 2004, has provided a tool (the "Database Utility") which can continuously scan the database when your computer is not busy looking for corruption.

Now, if the Database Utility finds some corruption you will be guided through the steps necessary to rebuild, see the next section for an explanation of the various steps.

Manual Rebuilds

Sometimes you may hit problems before the utility can find them for itself (maybe you turned the integrity check off, or maybe you run your PowerBook mainly on batteries, in which case the integrity check turns itself off so as to conserve your battery life). Typical symptoms of a corrupt database are issues like 'phantom' messages appearing in folders (messages that can't be selected, displayed or deleted), crashes when you select a particular folder, alarms firing for events that you cannot find or open, messages containing headers from other messages in their body text etc., etc.

If you are fairly sure that the database is corrupted then the rebuild is pretty simple to accomplish, even though it can take some time (several hours on a database as large as mine!). If you're Using Office 2004 the easy way is to find the Database Utility application (it's at "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Database Utility" by default) and double-click it. This will then guide you through the steps you need to follow (which will start with quitting ALL office applications if you have any open). Don't worry too much (unless you're a 'Belt and Braces' sort of person) about backing up the database first, the rebuild routine works always on a copy of your data, not the original, so you can always revert to your pre-rebuild version later if things go badly wrong.

Alternatively, if you quit all office applications then start up Entourage whilst holding down the Option key (double-click the actual application icon for Entourage, don't use any 'launcher' type utilities as these can fail to pass the option key through to Entourage itself). Keep the Option key held down as Entourage launches until you see the rebuild screen.

If you have any Office applications open (including Messenger or even the hidden "Database Daemon") you will get a prompt to quit them all. If only the daemon is running, this will be automatically quit by the Database Utility.

Once you have quit all the apps, you can continue to the next screen, where all your identities are listed (if you have more than one) and you are asked to select which Identity you wish to rebuild. You are also given a choice of 4 actions you may wish to carry out:

1. "Verify Database Integrity" - This is a new option in Office 2004 which should
reduce unnecessary rebuilding. Apparently it's quite sensitive. And see (4) below.

2. "Compact the Database". - Was called "Typical rebuild" in Office vX and earlier.
It is useful for reducing the size of a database when you have deleted a lot of
material, but uses the existing indexes to re-order things. This can cure some
minor problems, but is unlikely to fix any serious corruption.

3. "Rebuild the Database" - Was called "Advanced Rebuild" in Office vX and earlier.
This is the main rebuild routine. It will recreate all the indexes within the database
from the information that is available in the messages and other data. This should
(in theory) result in a database that is completely free from all kinds of corruption,
but may (in extreme cases) result in data that could not be reconstructed being
lost. Since this data would probably not have been accessible anyway, you are
unlikely to be any worse off

4. "Set Database Preferences". Actually there's only one pref: you can turn
on or off "Verify database in background ".

Select the option you want and let it run!

When the rebuild is finished, take a look in the Identity folder and you will see your new database, and a backup copy of the original. It's worth hanging on to the original in case you need to revert back to it because something went wrong with the rebuild (which very rarely happens). If you do need to revert, simply delete the file called "Database" and rename the backup copy to simply "Database".

Caveats

Rebuilds should never be done more often than necessary. Some people have been recommending a rebuild once a month as a preventative measure. This will not work. If you are unlucky enough to get your database corrupted, it will happen whether or not you have already rebuilt the database 600 times. Also, the rebuild process involves the moving around of a lot of data - data corruption is most likely to strike during the read-write phases of disk transfer. By frequent rebuilding you are actually increasing the risk of this happening.

In addition, a rebuild does loose some ancillary information. Links between items will be lost. local caches of newsgroups, exchange accounts, HotMail accounts and IMAP accounts will be deleted, meaning all those messages must be downloaded from the server once again. any Rules or Mailing List Manager entries that refer to specific folders will be reset to the local Inbox. All of this can be re-created, but it is a pain (especially resetting all the rules) and is not a task to be undertaken without good cause.

So, my major recommendation is to Verify before rebuilding, and only rebuild when you are convinced there is real corruption.

I decided to start this blog as a one-stop shop for many of the recurring themes that seem to trip up Users of Microsoft Entourage (the eMail, Calendar & PIM application for Microsoft Office for Mac) from time to time.

Don't get me wrong, Entourage is a great app, is robust and easily used and performs well for most people, most of the time. However, like all applications, it has it's quirks, and some people seem to run into problems that don't plague the majority of users.

So, the entries in this blog are the result of common posts to the two main user forums for Entourage - the Entourage:Mac mailing list, and the Microsoft Public Entourage Newsgroups

I hope you enjoy them, and find them useful. If you do, tell other people (and, if you don't, please tell me!).