The Entourage User's WebLog

I spend a lot (too much?) of time on the NewsGroups. One thing I have noticed over the years is how the pattern of usage has changed. It used to be the case that most people visiting the newsgroups were using a dedicated newsreader to post their messages. Nowadays most people use Google Groups as their access point. I can tell this because every post has a 'User Agent' header. I wrote a very simple script to display a person's user agent, called "User Agent" - it's available on my Scripts page.

Given the dominance of Google in other aspects of web access, this is hardly surprising. I think that people are missing out on an easily accessible wealth of information though. Using a web portal is OK, I suppose, if you only want to post a single message. Using it several times over in the next few days to follow the progress of the thread and get any replies is far from convenient though. Yes, you can set up bookmarks and favourites to make accessing the particular pages & threads a little easier, but it's still an operation that you have to instigate at regular intervals.

Wouldn't it be so much easier to let Entourage do the work for you? Basic newsreading capabilities are built into Entourage (some people, mainly dedicated News fanatics, claim the capabilities are too basic, but they are ideal for the beginner. The big advantage of using Entourage to read your news is that it is (or can be) automatic - messages will be downloaded for you according to a schedule you set up. No more firing up a browser and remembering to visit a web page, all the replies to your messages will be available within Entourage itself. To me, this makes much more sense, since Newsgroups use messages very similar to email messages, so it makes far more sense to use the same programme with it's familiar interface.

First thing you need to think about is the email address that will be used on the newsgroup. If the news account is accessing a public news server, you need to mask your email address or you are going to end up with an inbox full of spam! Public newsgroups are continually harvested for email addresses - you don't want your real one up there.

So, to set up a special newsgroup posting email account, go back to the accounts window, switch to the 'Mail' pane and click on the 'New' button again. Call this account "Newsgroup Posting", or whatever is convenient. In the 'Name' box, put either your real name, or (if it suits you) an alias to use in public. In the 'E-mail address' box, put an address that is either totally fake (like null@null.com), or is recognisable as yours by a human, but is suitably munged to hide it from the harvesting robots. Typical methods are to add '.INVALID' after the address (like I do), or to add words such as 'NO-SPAM' in the address somewhere (barry@NO-SPAMmvps.org). Please, be considerate though, and don't use another real person's email address here!

The only other box that needs filling in here is the 'SMTP Server box. This should be the same as the server that you use for the 'sending mail server' in your other account settings. I use 'localhost' here because I am using the mail server (postfix) built into OS X Tiger (you can get instructions for setting this up here). Now click the 'OK' button to create the account and save the settings. Now we can move on to set up the News account.

When you installed Entourage, it should have set up, by default, a news account called "Microsoft News server". If it's still there, the icon will be at the bottom of the folder listing in a mail view. If so, you can skip this next paragraph, which describes how to set up the news account, for those who have deleted it at some time in the past.

If you don't have the News account set up, you need to create a new one. Go to the 'Tools' menu in Entourage, and select 'Accounts'. Click on the 'news' label just below the toolbar of the accounts window and the News Accounts listing is shown. For you, it will probably be empty (I have four news accounts there, but then I'm not the average user!). Just click on the 'New' button in the toolbar. Fill in the boxes so they look like the picture on the right. the important one is the 'News Server' box - this must be "msnews.microsoft.com". The name of the account can be anything you like - that's only for your own reference. The email account you just set up for posting can be selected from the drop-down menu for 'e-mail account'. You don't have to put anything in the 'Organisation' box, but it is traditional to put your employer's name in here, if you are posting on behalf of the company.

Some additional settings are available under the 'Options' pane. these include the signature that you want to be used by default in the news postings. This can be any of the standard signatures set up for email messages, or you can create one (using the 'Signatures' item under the 'Tools' menu). The signature attached to any particular posting can, of course, be changed exactly like the signature can be changed in an email message. It is very unlikely that you will have to include any special headers - if you do feel the need to, then you probably know enough about what to do here! the final option is how many messages are to be downloaded at a time. Most news servers place a limit on how many messages are held before the older ones expire off the server. In practical terms, this setting will only affect what happens the first time that you connect to the newsgroup - after that, the new unread messages will be downloaded anyway. Messages will stay in Entourage until they are deleted from the server, then the message will also be deleted from Entourage. Now click the 'OK' button to save the changes and create the account.

If you followed all the instructions properly, you should now have a news server icon near the bottom of the folder listing in a mail view window. If you select it, you will get a message telling you that Entourage is downloading a full newsgroup list - this can take a few minutes for large news servers, especially if you are on dial-up. When the list appears, type ".mac." in the 'display newsgroups containing' quick-filter box at the top right of the window. This will show a much shorter list of Mac-specific newsgroups. Select the ones you are interested in (using cmd-click to select more than one), then click on the 'subscribe' button in the window's toolbar.

Now, you have the newsgroups set up for easy access - they can be selected just like a mail folder in Entourage. Not only are your own posts so much easier to make, and any answers to them so much easier to find, but because the messages continue to arrive, you will learn so much more about your favourite apps just by scanning through the new messages each day. Even better, there's no need to worry about your mail database getting too bloated, because after a few weeks, the messages will expire from the server and from your database.

Messages headers will be automatically downloaded any time you select a newsgroup. You can make this even more convenient by setting up a schedule to check the newsgroup every 10 minutes, one hour or whatever you find convenient. Also, set up a rule (under the news tab of the rules dialogue) to download the full messages as they arrive, so there will be no need to wait at all when you want to read the messages.

There you are, reading the newsgroups and learning about your apps made so much easier, by using the built in features of your favourite mail client

Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.

I recently blogged about a hack to the Google Earth application to let you use Microsoft Entourage as your mail client (I got lot's of mail about this - thanks for your expressions of appreciation!).

Well, Google just released a new version of the Macintosh Google Earth application, and it includes a preference setting to use Entourage

Yes, that's great, thanks Google for making this accessible.

However, I dug a little deeper...

They have exposed this preference setting that runs a seperate script to the script for Mail.app, and guess what is in that script? Yes, the exact same script I posted in my hack - even the variable names are the same.

It's nice to be appreciated in this way. It would be nicer to be acknowledged as well.

[Update 11th Feb - Google sent me an email to apologise, and added an attribution in the Keyhole BBS (and will add it to the next release). Thanks, Google for doing the right thing.]

Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.

I just uploaded a new script to my scripts page. The script is called "Remove Duplicates", and as the name implies, it will remove duplicated emails from any selected folder in Entourage. Since the script works on message-id it is quite reliable. Because checking every message in a folder against every other message in a folder can take quite some time, the script gives you audio feedback, telling you every once in a while how many messages are left to check.

Although I wrote this script some time ago I have never published it before now. I only got round to it now because someone wrote to me asking if I knew of such a script!

Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.

Microsoft Outlook (on the PC) allows uses to list their address book by "Last Name, First Name" order (much like a telephone directory). Many users are familiar with this layout and comment on Entourage's inability to sort contacts in this order. Such comments are, strictly speaking, incorrect. Entourage does sort contacts in this order when you click on the 'Name' column in the address book listing. The confusion arises because Entourage displays the names in "First Name, Last Name" format, so the sort order is not always immediately apparent.

However, there is now a solution. Go to the My Scripts page and download the "Last Name - First Name" script (it's at the bottom of the page). Run this script, and one of the spare custom fields in the Entourage Address Book will be populated with a copy of the contact's name in 'last Name, First Name' format.

You can set the Address Book to display this field in the contact listing by control clicking (right-clicking) on the column headers and selecting field 'Custom 8' to make it display. This field can then be dragged to the left hand side of the column listing and can even replace the 'Name' column if you deselect that column.

Filling this column only happens when the script is run. It won't happen automatically when a contact is added or edited. So, for best results, set a schedule in entourage to run the script once a week, once a day or even once an hour! It all depends how often you add or edit your contacts, and how 'up to date' you want to be.

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Schedule to run the script

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Update 4th Feb 2006: I just updated the script to v2.0.2 to remove a couple of silly bugs.

Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.