The Entourage User's WebLog

A request on the newsgroups prompted me to write a script I have been meaning to write for a long time. You see, the Corporate Identity rules at my place of work require that I have a lengthy signature appended to each email I send out. However, if i am replying to a mail from someone, they don't need to see the same 10 lines every time. Now some mail clients (like Outlook) allow you to set a different signature for original mails and for replies, but Entourage does not. this script will fix that. It will, if you set up a repeating schedule to run the script once per minute, check for a reply being written and change the signature accordingly. Full details on setting up this schedule are included in the script's readMe file.

The script is called "Set Sig for Reply" and is available from my script's page.
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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.

This is a bug-fix release to my "Add JPEG to iPhoto" script (first mentioned here) that takes JPGs attached to a selected Entourage message and adds it to iPhoto.

Thanks to a bug report by Arnaud le Bihannic, I found a small bug in the latest version of iPhoto that caused this script to terminate unexpectedly (OK, it made it crash!). iPhoto was returning control to the script too early after the import was started, but before it was completely finished, so the script then tried to set the comments on a photo that couldn't be accesse!

The fix was simple, just make a 1 second delay after iPhoto returned control to the script to give it time to catch up.

The new version can be downloaded from my scripts page

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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.

If you have an Exchange Account you are probably aware that event categories are stored locally, in the Entourage database, not on the server with the message (this is due to the way that Entourage and the server interact). The trouble with this is that if, for any reason, the local cache is deleted and the events downloaded from the server again, all the event categories are lost. this can happen due to a database rebuild, or because the local calendar has become out of sync with the server. This can be a real pain. I know, it kept happening to me!

So, I wrote a pair of scripts (grab them from my Applescripts page). The first (Store Event Categories) will save the name of all categories in the event's details window, like this:


The second script (Restore Event Categories) does the reverse - it will take these notes and apply those categories to the events (creating a new category if necessary).

The way to use these scripts is to run the first script (Store Event Categories) on a regular basis. Best thing is to set up a schedule to run the script once a day:


Then, if you need to restore the categories you can run the second script (Restore Event Categories) manually - but make sure you run this second script before the next scheduled run of the first script fires, or all your former categories will be set to 'None'!

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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.

I've been getting quite a few comments on my script to remove duplicate messages from a folder (Remove Duplicates v1.0, available from this page). I don't know why it has suddenly hit the radar, because that script is over four years old!

Anyway, I wrote it for a specific purpose, and from what I can gather, it seems to be quite a common task that people want to do. For whatever reason, many people end up with duplicate messages in their mail folders, and this script quite neatly removes them. It works on the 'current folder', which may be a folder selected in the folder list, or the containing folder of a selected or open message. It then scans through the folder, removing the newer versions of any duplicate messages.

How does it identify a duplicate? Well, other scripts I have seen rely on a combination of the subject and the sent date of a message, which is probably reliable 99.9% of the time, but is not guaranteed to be error free. Instead I use the 'Message ID' header within a message. This is unique to each mail message - unique not only to you, but throughout the known universe! If two messages in your database have the same Message-ID header, they ARE duplicates.

Now, folders can contain thousands of messages. To scan a folder comparing each message to a list of message-ID's of all the other messages can take a long, time For this reason, I wanted to give some feedback to the user. Trouble is, Applescript has no 'built in' method of displaying messages or progress bars (other than a dialog box with a button, which is messy and delays execution of the script). There are third party utilities available, but I couldn't reasonably expect other users to have them installed (or expect them to install these tools just to use my script). What every mac does have is audio. So, I arranged for the script to 'speak' it's feedback. Therefore, the script gives you a summary at the start of it's run, a countdown through the run and a summary at the end as to how many messages were deleted. This causes the minimum possible delay to the run time of the scritp and seemed like a good way to give unobtrusive feedback.

Of course, it catches some people out - I have had a message from someone in an office placement who used this script, but didn't know about the feedback because he always had his mac muted! Ah well. You can't catch every situation!

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.

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

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...