The Entourage User's WebLog

Some users of Intel macs have been reporting that their notifications had not been showing up - you know, those nice little semi-transparent blue windoids that show up in the corner of your screen when Entourage is in the background:

This flurry of reports prompted some questions that highlight some of the issues in tracking bugs: The reports started appearing shortly after the release of the 11.3 update - was it linked, or was it coincidental? Did the disappearance hit everyone at the same time, or did a first report just trigger a "hey, I'm not seeing those windows either" response from a lot more people? Most reports came from people running Intel macs - was it only that platform that was affected?

Well, MacBU saw the reports in the public newsgroups (and probably other places as well) and started investigating. Eventually they came up with a 'repro case' (a series of steps that could reliably reproduce the problem). So, it's a real issue. Who's affected? Simple answer is anyone running an Intel mac, Office 2004 and Messenger 6.x. However, that in itself is not enough to trigger the problem - things have to happen in a particular order. This highlights another problem in bug-hunting - it's not enough to find out what combination of products is responsible, you have to find out in what order they interact. What happens in this case? Well, here's the detail...

Both Office 2004 and Messenger 6.x use a similar scheme to provide that notifications window. They are actually controlled by a little background app called the 'Alerts Daemon'. However, there is a complication - Messenger is a Universal Binary application, Office is not. Therefore they can't be distributed with the same version of daemon. Messenger can use Office's daemon (running under Rosetta on an Intel Mac), but Office can't use Messenger's version if it's running natively on Intel. So, if the messenger daemon starts before the office daemon, then office can't use it, and is too confused to launch its own daemon, so your notifications don't show up. However, if the Office daemon starts up before Messenger daemon, then messenger is able to use it (in Rosetta) as well as office and all is well.

Now we know what is happening, the solution is obvious. Just force the Office daemon to launch first! The easy way to ensure this happens is to add the daemon to your 'start up' items when you log in. In the system preferences, select the 'System:Accounts' pane. Select your user, then the 'login items' tab. Click the '+' button below the list of login items and navigate to /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/ and select the 'Alerts Daemon.app' that is in that folder. This ensures the office daemon is started up first. You can leave Messenger in the start up items list (if it is already in there), since it won't try to launch its version of the Alerts Daemon until it receives a 'toast' notification. This won't happen during the login sequence as you won't be logged into messenger yet, so it is quite certain the office daemon will start first.

That should (after you have logged out and back in again) ensure that your notifications will work OK in future - if there are any problems, please report back.

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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.

There has been a lot of traffic in the newsgroups and mailing lists recently about bugs in the Timezone display in Entourage calendar events.

There does appear to be a relatively minor bug that appeared around the time of the swtich to DST (Daylight Saving Time). At first, a few reports suggested that it may have had to do with the delay that Australia slipped in at the last minute to prevent the change happening during the Commonwealth Games. However, subsequent reports impied the problem was more widespread than this.

The probelm manifests itself as a yellow banner across the top of an event in Entourage that states that the event is sheduled in a different time zone to your computer's time zone. It appears to be a conflict between 'PST' & 'PDT' timezones. The correction has occurred, and events are displayed in the right time slot, but the banner is displayed when it shouldn't be.



Yes, it's a bug in Entourage, but a fairly insignificant one. There is no effect on operation or performance of the programme, just this display oddity which looks a little disconcerting until you know why it happens.

I expect a fix for it will probably be in the next update, but until then there's no need to worry

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.

A cry of horror that we hear occasionally - you just started Entourage and all you got was a welcome email from Microsoft - 2 years of emails, hundreds of contacts, all the calendar data has just disappeared! What do you do?

Well first thing is to sit down, take a deep breath and (in the words of the infamous book) "Don't Panic"! The odds are in favour of your data being recovered.

Take a long think - have you done anything unusual with your computer recently? Upgrades the OS? Run a bunch of disk tests? Run a 'clean up' utility? Logged on as a different user? That last one is easy to fix, but it's surprising how many people it catches out.

The main reason for a problem like this is that Entourage could not find it's database when it started up, so it created a new one. This confuses a lot of people, because when you ask them if the database is in place they say "of course it is", not realising that the one they are looking at is the newly created one.


So, where does Entourage store it's data? In your main Documents folder, there will be a folder called "Microsoft User Data" (commonly called the MUD folder). All of the data for Entourage and other office apps is stored in here. Within the MUD folder can be several other folders, amongst which is the "Office 2004 Identities" folder. If you are running another version of Office, the folder will be named slightly differently, of course. Inside that folder will be a folder for each identity you have set up in Entourage. The default identity is simply called "Main Identity" and most people never change that name or create another. Finally, within the Identity folder we come to your data files - there will normally be at least four files in the identity folder, 'Database', 'Mailing Lists', 'Rules' and 'Signatures'. There may be more than this, or fewer, depending on how you use Entourage. Database will always be there.

If you have suddenly lost all your data, the first thing to check is that the correct files are in the right paths. File paths and names are critical - if you have renamed the MUD folder (or one of it's sub-folders) this will cause Entourage to lose it's place. If you have moved anything out of the correct path Entourage will recreate empty folders in the correct path. In the example shown above, the identity 'Test' has a size of 'only' 18mb. This is a empty database! This is what you will see if a new database has been created on Entourage startup. The 18mb is occupied by index tables and other database overheads. If you can see you own identity there, looking somewhat larger than 18mb and you can see another, smaller identity in there as well, then it may be that entourage simply picked the wrong one to start up with. This can be due to lost or damaged preference files. In Entourage, simply choose 'Switch Identity...' from the 'Entourage' menu and you should see your correct identity listed there for you to select.

If the right files are not in place, you need to search your disk to try and find them. Have you moved them in a 'tidy up'? has a disk utility or backup programme shifted things around? Search first for "Microsoft User Data", making sure you search the entire disk. If that finds nothing it could be that the folder has been renamed. Search instead for 'Database' which will potentially generate far more hits as it is a common enough file name. Include invisible files in your search - Disk directory problems can cause the system to move 'lost' files to an invisible folder at the root level of the disk during the start-up disk checks. Make sure you identify the right files by examining their enclosing folders if you get hits on 'Database'. If you can identify the right folders, quit all office apps and replace the empty MUD folder with the correct files, log out & back in again and then restart entourage. Hopefully everything will be back to normal again.

If you have searched the disk for the MUD folder and the database files and still found nothing there is one more possibility. Some versions of Norton/Symantec Anti-Virus programmes (and maybe other similar utilities) could identify a virus within the database (quite legitimately - you may have received an infected email at some point) and would either quarantine, delete or attempt to repair the infected file - in this case, the entire Database file! Any attempted repair could have caused irreparable damage to the database (this is why I never have these utilities set to do anything other than alert me to the existence of a potential problem). If the Database file has been quarantined, it may be a simple matter to release it, and replace the newly generated file with your original. Again, quit all apps first, and log out & back in again afterwards (this is necessary to force the system to release any preference or data files that it may be holding open, potentially pointing at the wrong database!).

If you've tried all that and still not recovered you data you may be out of luck. Best thing to do is ask for assistance on the newsgroups (see this blog entry for details) where you can fully describe you unique circumstances.

Please feel free to comment on this article using the links below. I'll try to answer any questions you raise.

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.

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.