The Entourage User's WebLog

I wrote the other day about setting up your mac to use Entourage for sending PDFs. The instructions I gave showed how to do it in OS X 10.4.x, and I had a few emails asking if it was possible in other version of OS X as well. the good news is that the same thing is possible in 10.3.x as well!

The views look a little different, but it works in the same way (although you have to set things up manually).

First, see if there is a folder ready - open up the Library folder in your Home directory. In there you may find a folder called "PDF Services" - if you don't, create one, but make sure you get the name just right.

Then, drag an alias to Entourage into that PDF Services folder (You can make an alias easily by command-option-dragging the Entourage application icon to that folder). Give it a sensible name, like "Send PDF through Entourage".

Now, when you start up the print dialog in any application, under the 'PDF button' (the second button in the bottom left hand corner of the dialog) you will see your option to send through Entourage.

This will work with Entourage 2004 or Entourage vX.

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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.

Do you ever find yourself emailng PDF documents to other people? Or, do you wish it was a lot easier to turn that wrod document into a PDF to be emailed to a client? Well, it can be made as easy a two mouse-clicks. Read on...

If you open a document (any sort of document) and open the print dialog (in OS X 10.4.x) in the bottom left hand corner of the print dialog is a 'PDF' menu, looking something like this:

Note that there is already an action to "Mail PDF". This will create a PDF of your document and try to send it using Apple's Mail.App. However, it is really easy to make a menu item that will use Entourage instead. Just select the last item in this menu ("Edit Menu...") to open this dialog:

Now, click the little '+' button in the bottom left hand corner and navigate to your Microsoft Office folder (usually in /Applications) and select the Microsoft Entourage application. This will be added to the menu.

Now, wnhenever you want to mail aPDF of a document, just open the print dialog in the normal way, and select 'Microsft Entourage' from the PDF menu in the print dialog. If a draft message window is frontmost in Entourage already, the PDF will be attached to that message. If there isn't, then a new draft message window will be opened and the PDF attached to that. It's that easy; two clicks - choose 'Print' in whatever application holds your original document, and choose 'Microsoft Entourage' from the PDF menu in the print dialog.

If that's all you needed, you can stop reading now, but if you want the explanation & geek stuff read on...

The entries for this menu are stored in two places - "/Library/PDF Services" (for options available to all users of your mac) and "~/Library/PDF Services" for the local user (i.e. you!). Normally, these entries are Automator Workflows or Applescript droplets (applications that can receive files dropped onto them). However, we can take advantage of Entourage's built in behaviour here. Any file dropped onto the Entourage application will be attached to a mail message in exactly the way I have describe earlier - an existing draft message window if one is open in front or a new draft window if not. So, by adding 'Microsoft Entourage' to the menu in the way I described (it is added to the local PDF Services folder) an alias to Entourage is added to the local PDF Services menu. Dropping a file on this alias works exactly the same way as dropping a file on the application itself. That's how it works.

Now, to customise things, you can open '~/Library/PDF Services' and change the name of the alias from "Microsoft Entouragfe" to "Mail PDF with Entourage" or anything else you like. Alternatively, if you wanted to do anything more complex with the PDF (like, use a specific account, or include some bod text etc) you could create an AppleScript Droplet that would acheive those functions and add it to this folder. The function will then appear in the PDF menu any time you invoke the print function. Write me a comment if you have any particular requirements in mind, and I may create another article on how to write the scripts necessary...

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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.

They say it's never too late to learn...

Us MVPs are supposed to be experts. We're supposed to know all about the applications in our award area. there shouldn't be anything left to take us by surprise. But, just occasionally...

Less than two weeks ago, I set out to make one little task easier. I wrote in this blog about a script I had written to easily remove the product key registration in Microsoft Office 2004 (because the only other way was to get down and dirty in the Terminal). Now, I learn that I wasted my time! There's a much easier way.

MacOSXhints reports this simple method:

Go to the "Remove Office" application (in /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Additional Tools/Remove Office/) and double-click to launch it. At the first dialog box, hold down the Option Key and the 'Continue' button changes to 'Remove License Info Only'. Just click the button!

Now, wasn't that easier?

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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.

Scriptability is one of the great features of Entourage. It allows every user to make Entourage work in ways they want it to and to add new features, without causing th eapplication to become bloated beyond all use and sense. But, the average user doesn't use any scripts, which is a great shame because they are missing out on so many adbantages. All too often, when a script solution is proposed on the newsgroups, the person with the problem responds with words to the effect "I'm a complete novice with scripts, and I don't understand what to do..."

Well, here's hoping that this article will explain how to get scripts, install then and use them in a way that is clear enough for users of all abilities.

First, catch your script...

(With apologies to Mrs Glass)

Before you can use a script, you need to have one. There's three basic ways to catch your script.

You could download one. There are some good places for scripts. I have a few of mine here, there are many more at the ScriptBuilders web site. There are scripts providing all kinds of additional functionality available. Take a while to see if there is anything there to suit your needs. If you download a script frm either of these places it will most likely be in the form of a 'Compiled Script' - this is a file format that is useable directly by Entourage.

Or, you could ask on the newsgroup or mailing list. There are some experts hanging out in those places, and if a script solution is most applicable, they will either point one out to you, or may write one and post it in reply. These scripts will be in text form, usually pasted into the body of the message. This will need to be 'compiled' before it can be used. More on that later.

Finally, you could write your own! This isn't as difficult as it sounds. There are plenty of resources available, either on the web or in book form. If (when?) you get stuck, you can ask on the newsgroups mentioned earlier - there are always people there willing to help out.

So, let's assume you have caught your script now, and move n to steo two...

Step Two - Compiling...

If you have downloaded a script, and in the Finder it is described as "Compiled OSA Script (Data Fork)" then all is well, you can skip this step.

Otherwise, lets assume that you have copied the script from an email message. Lets pretend that this is the script you found (it will permanently delete selected messages without leaving them in the Deleted Items mail folder):

tell app "microsoft entourage"
set theMessages to current messages
delete themessages
try
delete themessages
end
end

You now need to make a script from it. First open up "Script Editor" - this is the application that Apple provides for writing, compiling and saving scripts. Find it in the "Applescript" folder of your "Applications" folder. Script Editor should start up with a new empty window. Copy the lines containing the script and paste them into the script window. Click on the 'Compile' button and the script should become nicely formatted like this:

It is possible that the Script Editor will throw an error at this stage - maybe because the original writer made a syntax error, but more likely because the mail client or list server put a line break into the script. The part of the script throwing the error will be highlighted in the script window and it is usually fairly obvious where the line break has occurred - just remove the line break and re-compile. Occasionally, the line break will occur at a point where it doesn't immediately throw an error, and the highlighted text may be on the line below the real error - again, this is usually fairly easy to spot, just by reading the script. Don't worry, you'll very quickly get used to spotting these errors in supplied scripts, even if you can't write your own scripts!

Saving The Script

Having successfully compiled the script, you now need to save it. The best place to put it is in Entourage's special scripts folder. In the script Editor window, select 'Save' (or 'Save As...') from the file menu. Type in a suitable name for the script (I used "Full Delete for this example). The 'File Format' drop down should default to "script" which is what you want. Leave all the other options alone, like this example:

Now, navigate first to your 'Documents' folder, then to the 'Microsoft User Data' folder, then to a folder in there called 'Entourage Script Menu Items' and click the 'Save' button.

If you got things right, the script is saved as a 'Compiled Script' and will appear in Entourage's Script menu (the little black 'scroll' icon just to the right of the 'Help' menu) as shown in the partial screen shot here. This script can then be easily accessed at any time directly from within Entourage, without having to resort to the Script Editor application ever again! You can now quit Script Editor, and we'll move on to the next section, how to use the script.

Running the script

In its simplest form, you can just run the script by selecting it from the script menu as I described above. But, there are other options. The example I used needs you to select some messages first, then run the script (and they will be permanently removed form Entourage, so select some messages you don't want any more if you intend to try the script!). But, there are other options...

You can, if the script is a suitable one, set up a schedule to run a script automatically at some predefined time. Use of schedules is fairly straightforward, select 'Schedules' from the Tools menu, click on the 'new' button and explore the timing options under the 'When' section. In the 'Action' section, you can set the schedule to 'Run AppleScript', as in this example:

When you click the 'Script...' button, you can select any script on your system, it doesn't have to be in the Script Menu Items folder, but this is still the best place to put scripts as they can then also be run manually.

In a similar manner, you can set a script to run as the action to a rule. For example, with the sample script just created and saved earlier, you could set up a rule to permanently delete any messages from a particular sender that you no longer want anything to do with. Simply set up your selection criteria to match whatever messages you want to kill, and set the rule action to run the script. You'll never see the messages again, they'll be completely deleted as they arrive!

They're the three basic methods to run a script in Entourage, but there's more...

Using Keyboard Commands

Once a script is in the Script Menu Items folder, you can easily assign it a keyboard shortcut. Go back to the partial screen shot of the Entourage Script Menu earlier in this article - notice how 'Insert Firefox URLs' and 'Insert Notes' have keyboard commands next to them? These scripts can be called with a keyboard command, just like many other menu items (Command-Control-U and Command-Control-N in these cases). Assigning keyboard commands is easy. You just use a particular 'code' at the end of the script name when you save it to define the keyboard command. In the case of 'Insert Firefox URLs', the script was saved with the name "Insert Firefox URLs v1.0\cmU.scpt" Entourage ignores the '.scpt' extension anyway - that will never appear in the Entourage menu. Then, Entourage uses the '\cmU' at the end of the name proper to define the keyboard shortcut. the '\' declares the existence of the shortcut. the 'c' defines the Control Key modifier, the 'm' the Command Key modifier and the 'U' the actual key to use with the modifier. So, '\cmU' is understood by Entourage to mean Control-Command-U, and that symbol is put in the script menu to the right of the script name. The modifiers you can use in this way (either singly, or in combination) are:

• \c - Control Key
• \m - Command Key
• \o - Option Key
• \s - Shift Key

So, you can now change the name of our example script to "Full Delete\csF.scpt" in the Finder. Next time you select the Script menu in Entourage, you will see the symbols for Control-Shift-F have been added to the script's name in the list. The Full Delete script can now be run just by selecting some messages and hitting Control-Shift-F. Easy.

Just one warning with keyboard shortcuts - if you happen to define one that is used elsewhere in Entourage, the script will over-ride the 'standard' shortcut. So, if you defined a script to use Command-R, for example, the script would run just fine with this command, but you could never again use Command-R to reply to a message! For this reason, I tend to use the Control key in all my script keyboard shortcuts - the Control key isn't used by the system or the Entourage application for keyboard shortcuts, so you're pretty safe from conflicts.

There's more information on using keyboard shortcuts at the Entourage Help Page web site here.

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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.

Every once in a while we get things wrong

One of the fairly common errors reported with Office installs is that the user will get an error message saying "This copy of Office is in use by another user" (or words to that effect - I can't check without loading up another machine at the moment). This often happens when people buy the 'Student & Teacher' edition of Office which allows three separate installations, but comes with three different Product Keys. People often forget which product key was used on which computer and then get the error (which also forces you to quit the applications!).

The Official Microsoft Way of putting this right is to de-install office using the 'Remove Office' utility they provide, and then to re-install everything. That's a pain. The Product Key info is actually stored in two places on your hard drive - remove either one, and it will be re-sreated from the other location. You have to remove both parts. One of these is a hidden file in the Office folder. Now, it used to be possible to use a custom search ion the Finder to find and delete hidden files, but that is no longer possible in Tiger (I suspect this is a bug in the Finder, but whatever the reason, this method can no longer be used). Hidden files can be removed using the Terminal, but most users are a little loathe to go delving into the wonders of the command line!

So, to make it easy for everyone, I wrote this little script application that will de-serialise Microsoft Office 2004 for you, at the click (or double-click actually) of the mouse. Please, before you try it out, make sure you have your Product Key to hand!

The script is called "De-Serialise Microsoft Office" and is available on 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.

So, your work colleague sent you a hilarious animated GIF graphic that you enjoyed so much. You went to send it to your best friend, but when you hit the 'Forward' button the formatting is lost. Worse still, when you send the graphic, you friend reports that the image isn't animated. What did you do wrong? Nothing!

Entourage has a relatively simple HTML engine built in that is used for display and editing of HTML content in 'simple' HTML messages. This limits the HTML available to fonts, sizes, colours and a few other relatively minor formatting attributes. This is the limit of what can be _created_ in Entourage.

However, when a more complex message arrives (something using tables or frames, for example), rather than failing to display it, the display is passed off to a more complex rendering engine (the 'Tasman' engine). This can display 'complex' HTML, but cannot create it.

Now, when your animated GIF arrived it was probably wrapped up in a complex HTML message (it must have been to be displayed animated). The display of the message was passed off to Tasman, which was capable of animating the GIF for you.

When you chose to forward the message, the new draft forwarded message was opened up using Entourage's more simple html editing engine. This strips out all the frames, tables etc that it can't handle (which is why you see formatting changes). When the message is sent, there is nothing in it to trigger the passing of the message to the Tasman engine on receipt, and the internal rendering engine can't animate GIFs.

The work round is to forward the original message as an attachment, which preserves the original 'complex html', but it may need the receiving client to open the attachment before they see the animation (this depends on their client and the format of the original message).

You can create and send original messages with animated GIFs in Entourage 2004, however. You do it this way:

1. Create a new word document containing the message you want to send. When you insert the animated GIF, put it into a word table - a 1 row x 1 column table will do fine.
2. Choose "send to > mail recipient (as HTML)" from the file menu
3. Address your message and send.

Now, recipients using Entourage will receive a complex HTML message that will be passed to the Tasman engine and have the GIF animated

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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.

Do you ever send an email to yourself? While at first this may seem an unlikely event, there are several circumstances when it may be a quite reasonable proposition. For example, do you send messages to your home email address form your work computer? Or, do you send mails out to several people and put your own address in the 'To' field, and the list of recipients in the 'BCC' field? This latter situation is one that is often suggested in the newsgroups to people who want to circulate a news-type email, but keep the recipients addresses secret.

Whatever the reason, if you do, it is likely that you will often find that the copy of the email sent to yourself will end up marked as junk mail. this will likely happen if you have the junk Mail Filter set to 'High', or 'Exclusive'.

Why does this happen? You own email address is in your Address Book, so these mails should not be marked as junk, should they?

Well, normally Entourage doesn't mark mail as junk if it comes from a person in your address book, but there is one exception.
Entourage has a special contact that is designated as the 'Me' contact. Only one contact has this designation, and it gets a special icon in the address book, as shown by the picture on the right. Mail from an email address that belongs to this contact is excluded from the normal rule that address book contacts are considered 'Junk-Safe'. Usually, this contact is created when you first install Office, from the contact information that you fill in during the First Run process. After that time, you can assign any other contact to be the 'Me' contact at any time using the 'This Contact Is Me' menu item in the 'Contact' menu. This will assign a new Me contact and remove the designation from the previous 'Me' contact.

For most users, the only purpose of the Me contact is in the way the Junk Mail Filter treats it. A common practice in junk mail is to put the same email address (yours!) in the 'To' field and in the 'From' field. Mail addressed in this way is automatically treated as suspicious by the Junk Mail Filter. However, as described in the first paragraph, there are good and legitimate reasons why you may want to send mail to yourself and not have it marked as junk. there are a couple of ways to work round this.

The first is to use a simple rule, like this:

This simply checks for your email address in any incoming mail and changes the status to 'not junk mail'. Note that the 'Do not apply other rules...' check box is unchecked, so that other rules may still be applied to messages filtered by this rule, and that this rule must be high up in the list of rules to avoid it being missed if other rules catch the message first.

The problem with such a simple rule is that you will automatically mark a lot of junk mail as 'Not Junk' as well. All the junk mail that has your email address in the 'from' field will be passed as safe by this rule. So, obviously, it needs some refinement.

The next stage is to apply some other criteria to the rule, to be a little more certain that the mail really is from you. The 'Proper Name' is one such possibility. Often the lists of addresses used for sending spam will only contain email addresses and not proper names. So, junk mail supposedly from your email address could have some fake name (or none at all) in the proper name space: for example, "Pauline ". To catch this (and assuming you have you mail clients set up to use your proper name correctly), you can refine the rule to contain a second selection criteria:

So, now in order for the rule to run the email has to have both the right email address AND the right proper name (you also need to ensure the 'Execute' setting is set to "all criteria", not "any criteria"). This is a much better rule, but still not foolproof. A fair amount of spam seems to be able to pick up the right proper name as well - especially spam from lists that have been compiled from mailing list archives or newsgroups.

To improve things still further, we need to have a means of identifying the origin of an email beyond all doubt. This last method relies on an attribute that really couldn't be faked by any serious junk mail engine:

In this case, the rule looks for a specific header (called 'x-verify'), and only runs if it finds that header, and that header contains the phrase "barryw" (you can, of course, substitute and specific header name or phrase you like). Note also that I have changed the other selection criteria from a simple email address to the more generic "From is Me" - this rule will now work with mail from any email address in the Me contact, without having to have separate rules for each email address.

So, how does this header find it's way into my messages? Entourage has a way of inserting custom headers into every email you send. Under the Tools menu, select 'Accounts'. Double click on an account in the list of accounts to edit its settings, and select the 'options' tab. Here you can add the custom header, like this:

Naturally, you need to ensure that the header name and pass-phrase match those that you put in the mail rule. Also, in order to ensure that you comply with internet mail protocols, make sure your custom header name starts with 'x-', contains lower case only and has no spaces. Almost anything you like can go in the 'value' field, but it is best to ensure that the total length of the header name and value fields is less than 75 characters.

That's it. now, any mail you send yourself will not be marked as junk, yet you can be pretty certain that mail with forged headers containing your email address will still be correctly captured.

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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.

Did you know there was an easy way to have nice looking signatures at the end of your messages? You can, by using HTML messages and signatures make good use of size, colour and styling. This is nothing new. However, many people do not realise that you can also include images in your signatures!

Here's how.

First, from the Tools menu, choose 'Signatures'. Click on the 'New' button to make a new, empty signature. The text in the 'Name' box will be highlighted, ready for you to give this signature a name to identify it. Then, click the 'Use HTML' button in the signature window's toolbar - this is the button with the 'ab/ab' symbol:

This will make the text in the signature field HTML and activate the font & styling buttons in the toolbar. Now, you can design your signature. Remember, the signature is intended to be an adjunct to your message, so would normally be better set in small, low key colours and fonts. For simple signatures that's all you need to do. Just close the signature window to save your work. In order to use the signature, when you create a new message you can select this as the signature from the Signature button in the message toolbar - the one that looks like a fountain pen

If the signature text appears, but not the colours and styling, you need to make the message use HTML, or it can only use the plain text of the signature. Turn on message HTML in the same way you did for the signature window, by clicking on the 'ab/ab' symbol. Better still, you can assign a particular signature as the default. Open up the Account Settings window. From the Tools menu; choose 'Accounts' and double-click the account to open its settings window. Select the 'Options' pane, and the first option is the signature to use on this account's messages by default. Select the signature you just created from the drop-down menu. To set the default mail format to HTML so you don't need to switch it on each time, go to the Entourage application preferences (Entourage menu; 'Preferences'). Select 'Compose' and in the 'General' section there are drop-down menus for the default format for mail and news messages. Set these to HTML.

Now, create a new mail message, and you should see your pretty HTML signature appear, just like magic

OK, that's the first stage, now let's add a graphic image. Remember, these will be added to every message you send, so unless you want your correspondents to be seriously cheesed off at you, keep the graphic as small as you possibly can! Again, discreet and retiring should be the order of ther day.

Open the signature for editing, making sure that HTML formatting is turned on. Put the insertion point where you want your image to appear and select 'Insert', then 'Picture' from the Message menu. This will let you select a picture to insert, using the standard file selction dialog. Note that you can also insert Background Images that will be displayed as a background to the full message when your recipient opens it (in those email clients that support the feature). You could also insert sounds and movies, but that's probably complete overkill for an email signature!

Finally, if you're not the creative kind, there are some excellent examples on the Mactopia web site. Use these as a starting point to design your own signatures. Here's mine:

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 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.

There was recently a post on the newsgroups about some poor soul who couldn't start Entourage because they had 270,000 emails in the Inbox. This was primarily due to a deluge of Spam, at the rate of about 5,000 per day. Still that means they had left things for about two months before they had dealt with anything. While his experience may be extremely extreme, I am constantly surprised how few people make any great effort to keep their mail organised.

Me? I'm at the opposite end of the scale. I take it as a personal affront if any mail hits the inbox, without being intercepted and re-filed before it gets there. Lucky for me that Entourage has 3 built in methods to help you organise things easily. These are the Mailing List Manager (MLM), the Junk Mail Filter (JMF) and Mail Rules (no acronym for that one!). What's more, that is the order in which they operate, which will shortly become a significant piece of information.

Let's look at each of these in some greater detail...

The Mailing List Manager

This is only of any use if you make use of mailing lists, such as the Entourage:Mac mailing list, TidBITS, Apple Lists or any one of about a million different public or private lists out there.

If you do subscribe to a mailing list (assuming that list is served by a dedicated List Server - most of them are), there is a very easy way to organise the mail coming from that list. Simply select any mail from the list server, and from the 'Tools' menu, select 'Mailing List Manager'. A small window will open up listing all you MLM entries in there. First time you do this the window is empty. Simply click on the 'new' button in the small toolbar at the top of the window, and a new window opens, which should be already filled in with the lists details. It should look something like this:
I have added the check in the box to move the list mail to a dedicated folder and also to move any messages I send to the list to that same folder. I don't automatically set a category for list mail (I use categories in other ways, which I may blog about another day). In the simplest form, that's all you need to do. Now, any list mail will automatically be moved to the folder you selected as it arrives - already, with just that one mouse-click, you have started to diminish the load on your inbox and get your email sorted out!

However, you can go further. Click into the 'Advanced' tab in that window, and see these options (on the right)
You can see that I haven't used many of these options, and most people probably never will. let's explore them, however. Alternate address is used if messages from the list can come from another address as well - this sometimes happens with a moderated list when some messages intercepted by the moderator come from their address instead of the main list address, but such situations are few and far between. the admin address seems to be reminder only at this time - maybe the MacBU are intending to put in auto-subscribe/unsubscribe functionality into Entourage at some point in the future. certainly nothing you put into that field has any effect at the moment.

I can't think why you would want to mark messages as read when they arrive, but apparently some people do. the option is there if you are one of them. Some lists insist on a prefix to subjects to/from the list. this will automatically add them. Personally, I hate them. Rules & list messages can be a complex issue. I suspect that most people who are using the MLM to file list messages will not want any rules to run on list messages and muck things up.

'Delete Copies' is handy for some people. They have sent a message to the list, and when the message is distributed most lists will send a copy to all subscribers _including_ the sender. if you don't want copies of your own messages coming back to you, just check this box. they'll be deleted before you see them.

Do you know about Digests? Most Mailing Lists give you the option of either receiving every message sent through the list as an individual email, or for batches of messages to be collected up into a single digest that is sent out once or twice a day 9or less frequently for low volume lists). If you have opted to receive digests, many of these can be automatically burst into individual messages as they arrive with the next set of option. this doesn't work for every type of message digest though - there are different digest formats. However, it will work with digests from modern list servers, which covers 90% or more of mailing lists.

Then, we have an option to specify an applescript to run on mailing list messages. this opens up a whole range of possibilities! However, the most common use I make of this option is to change the account of list messages, as I get some list traffic in to an alias account whose mail is redirected to one of my real accounts. If I forget, and just 'reply' to one of these messages without setting the correct account for the reply, I will get a bounce-back from the mailing list server who will refuse to deliver my mail because it came from an email address that was not subscribed to the list.

Finally, we have options for the reply behaviour. List can be set up so you r replies go back to the list (to be circulated to all subscribers) or to go back to the sender of the message you are replying to. Lists seem to be fairly evenly split between these two options. this setting in the MLM gives YOU the power to choose what you want to happen, rather than the Listmom (the person who runs the mailing list is invariably known as 'mom').

As you can see, the MLM is a powerful tool for organising list mail as it arrives AND for helping you keep your replies organised as well. Now all you list mail is conveniently organised, lets move on to...

The Junk Mail Filter

Spam (Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE) is the scourge of the internet. Everyone gets spammed at some time (unfortunately). it is a penalty we have to pay to use email.I have a variety of strategies i use to try and keep my spam load to reasonable proportions (maybe another subject for a future blog entry), but no matter what, some spam always finds it's way to me and my Entourage. Again, there is a very useful tool for handling spam. From the 'Tools' menu (again), select 'junk E-mail Protection...' (these instruction apply to Entourage 2004 - in vX it was called 'Junk Mail Filter...' and some of the option I will describe were different or missing).

Here we have the first window for the JMF settings. It's worth pointing out once again that the JMF runs on messages AFTER they have been passed through any MLM entries you have, so Mailing list traffic should never be marked as spam. The four levels are fairly self explanatory. The top level (Exclusive) is really severe, and not really suitable for anyone who is likely to get mail from unexpected addresses. This includes just about anyone using email for business purposes. It could be disastrous for a new customer's email enquiry to be consigned to a junk mail folder just because you hadn't got their email address in your address book. I have found that 'High' is pretty good for me, but, as I said earlier, I have lots of MLM entries and mail rules to handle mail that can be identified, and so avoids the JMF. Mail that the JMF identifies as spam will be moved to the Junk e-mail folder for that account. It won't be automatically deleted before you can check it, so you needn't worry about false positives ('good' mail that is incorrectly marked as spam).

The only other option available in this window is to automatically delete mail from the Junk E-mail Folder after a certain length of time. i settle on 30 days a a good value here - it means I will certainly check the mail in the Junk folder before it gets deleted (I tend to check about every other day) but it will get deleted before too much builds up. If only the poor poster I mentioned at the top of this entry had selected such an entry - he would never have reached the stage at which Entourage refused to open.

Now switch to the 'safe Domains' pane. Here you can define whole domains that are known to be safe. This way, I will never, according to the setting I have in there, have mail marked from btyahoo, symantec etc marked as spam. You odn't have to type the domains into here - if a good mail is ever marked as spam, you can always use the 'not spam' button in the toolbar that appears when a junk mail is selected. This will give you several options - to add the sender to your address book (address book contacts are NEVER marked as spam), to create an MLM entry, to add the domain to the list in this window, or to do nothing else, just 'unjunk' that message alone.

OK, now we have dealt with mail from mailing lists and spam. Let's sort out all the other stuff that comes in...

Mail Rules

Once again, go to the 'Tools' menu and this time select 'rules'. First thing to notice is that there are six different types of mail rule:

To my mind, this is a weakness in Entourage. There is no way to transfer rules from one type of account to another. It must surely be a common occurrence that you want mail from the same person to be handled in the same way, no matter which email address of yours they send their messages to? however, the developers have taken the decision to segregate all the different types of account. There is some justification for this, as not all selection criteria for rules is applicable to all types of account - for example, IMAP messages may only have had the headers downloaded when the rule is applied (this is the default behaviour)

Anyway, this behaviour isn't likely to change in the near future, so we'll just have to live with it. Let's make a new rule. Click on the 'New' button:

Here's new Rule window. It's divided into roughly 4 regions. The first of these is the name of the rule. Call it anything you want, it won't affect how the rule works, so choose a name that will still mean something to you in five years time!

Next we come to the Selection Criteria. You can have lots of criteria, even though there is only one shown by default in a new rule window. The 'execute' pop-up menu determines how these criteria work - either messages that match ALL the criteria will be acted on by the rule, or messages that match ANY ONE of the criteria. So, you can set it so either any messages from 'Fred' OR from 'Bill' will be acted on, or it could be just messages from 'Fred' AND with "photo" in the subject will be acted on.

Now you can set the criteria. Where the pop-up says 'all messages', click on the menu item, and see what options are available. these will vary depending on the type of mail account. When you have selected something other than 'all messages' (which is self explanatory) you are likely to get one or two other settings in the criteria line - usually a comparison operator and a value field, like this:

Add as many criteria as you like. Simply keep clicking on the 'Add Criterion' button above the first line and setting the options appropriately. When you have your selection criteria set up, move on the move on to the next section - the actions. Two are provided as examples, but again, many more are available. You can add to these two, or delete from the list with the 'Add' & 'Remove' buttons. You need to remember that the actions take place in the order you have set them up, so if you copy a message to a new location before you assign a category, the copy will not have that category set. The exception to this is an applescript execution - this is passed off to a different thread, and can take place independently from other actions on the message - either before them or after them.

Finally we come to the last section - what I'll call the rule preferences. These are the last two check boxes in the window. The first one should be checked if you are happy that this rule will be all you need to do with a message - you can then check this box and after this rule has handled a message it will not be passed on to other rules to check against their criteria. All processing is finished. If your rule moves a message to different folder, this option will be checked and greyed out. You cannot pass the message on to other rules if it has been moved. This is unfortunately a limitation caused partly by Entourages mail system and partly by mail standards, but it means that a message move must be arranged to be the last rule you want to run on a message. Finally we come to the 'Enabled' check box. If this box is checked (and it is repeated in the list of rules in the Rules window) then any messages that get past the MLM and the JMF and any preceding rules will be checked against the criteria of this rule. If the box is unchecked, the rule will not run automatically as messages arrive, but can be run against a bunch of selected messaged using the 'apply rule' menu item in the 'Message' menu or the contextual menu you get if you control-click (right-click) on a message. This can be useful on occasions, when you want to automate a sequence of operations, but want to apply them only to messages _you_ select. Set up a rule with the selection criterion 'All Messages', set the actions to your chosen sequence of operations, and uncheck the 'Active' button. You can now run these actions simply by selecting some messages and manually running the rule as described above.

Hopefully, you will now have a a bunch of MLM entries, the JMF set up and a collection of rules as well. All your mail will be filtered into different mail folders as it arrives. Apart from keeping stuff nice and organised (which helps when you are looking for that particular message off Auntie Mabel) it means that _you_ can be more organised and can prioritise the way ion which you read your maIL - mail from your boss can be checked before anything else, because it will all be in the one place, and easily identified because his folder will be highlighted in bold whenever these is unread mail in it.

This was a longer post than normal, but I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave you comments by using the links below. I try to answer all comments, and love to hear from you.

This has been raised on the newsgroups a couple of times this week, and is a recurring theme - a FAQ in fact!

Before I tell you how to request one and to automate responses to them, let me say that they can be worse than useless! When you request a Return Receipt (or, in the more up to date version, a Disposition Notification Request) you are reliant on the request being honoured by the receiving party. Outside of the corporate world such support is almost non-existent. Even within corporations support is patchy at best. In setting up responses, things are a little better in that you are now in control. The combination of rule and script I describe later will generate a response to a DNR request, but will not automatically send it. A reply will be drafted and the reply window left open for you to send or discard as you see fit - you lose no control or privacy through following the methods laid out here.

Sending a DNR

In order to request a DNR, a special header must be inserted into the message headers. Entourage does allow the insertion of additional headers, but only on an account wide basis.

Open the account for editing (ToolsAccounts; then select the account & click on Edit). Under the 'Options' tab, second item down is 'Additional Headers'. In the 'Header' column enter "Disposition-Notification-To" (without the quotes); and in the 'value' column enter your email address. DNRs will now be sent out with every message from this account.

If you have only an occasional need to do this on a message by message basis, duplicate your account and add the header to the new account only. Make sure that this account is NOT included in any mail checking schedules, but that mail from this account IS sent with every send. Now, to include the return-receipt, simply change the account of a message to this ‘DNR’ account with the pop-up menu that appears next to the 'from' header in a draft message window when you have more than one account defined.

Responding to mail received with a DNR Request

Responding to a request needs a combination of a rule and a script. The rule to detect the DNR header in incoming mail, the script to generate the reply.
First step: download the script. Save it in the 'Entourage Script Menu Items' folder inside the Microsoft User Data Folder that is in your Documents folder (the script could go anywhere at all, but it is easiest to put it in there).
Next, create a rule: From the Tools menu, select 'Rules'. Select the correct pane for your account type - rules for POP, IMAP, Hotmail, Exchange, News and outgoing mail are all segregated. You could create this rule in any of the first 4 types - DNRs for News and outgoing mail do not make any sense. Create a new rule and configure it in the following manner:

---

---

Note that the text in the "Specific Header" box says 'Disposition-Notification-To', the checkbox to prevent additional rules running is UNCHECKED (or non of your other rules would work). This rule needs to be placed at the top of your list of rules, so it runs before any other rule. Under the 'Action' setting, click on the 'Script...' button and navigate to the 'Generate Return Receipt v1.1' script you just downloaded and installed.

That's it - the system isn't perfect, because it relies on other people having their systems configured in a way that will work with you, and that's an unreliable situation at best. Still, it does at least restore some of the functionality that corporate users (especially users of Outlook/Exchange) have become used to having around.

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.

On the first day of MacWorld, the Mac version of Google Earth was finally released.

Anyone who has seen this app running in Windows can't fail to have been impressed, and the mac version is just as good

However, one thing ticked me off. The 'mail' button (used to send location files and images via email) is hard-wired to Apple's Mail.app. I use Entourage. That was annoying.

In fact, it ticked me off so much that I worked out a little hack for it. Here's how to modify the app so that it uses Entourage as it's mail client instead of mail.app:

1. Right-click on the Google Earth.app icon and select 'show package contents'
2. 
   
3. Look in Contents/Resources and find this file: emailplacemark.scpt
4. 
   
5. Option drag it to the desktop to make a copy there, and open it in a text editor (it may not open in a script editor)
   
6. Replace the text of the script with this text:
   
   tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
activate
try
set theSubject to "%1"
set theBody to "%2"
set theAttachments to {%3}
set myMessage to make new outgoing message ¬
     with properties {subject:theSubject, content:theBody}
tell myMessage
repeat with fileInfo in theAttachments
make new attachment at end with properties ¬
     {file: alias (posix file (get filename of fileInfo))}
end repeat
end tell
open mymessage
end try
end tell
(Download the file from here, if you like)
   
   
7. Rename the original script as emailplacemarkORIGINAL.scpt, or something like it (so you can easily restore the file if anything goes wrong) and copy your modified script back in to the Resources folder.

Google Earth will now send locations (and images) via entourage.

There's another version of this same script in the folder Google Earth.app/Contents/MacOS/kvw/ for some reason, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything.

Please post any comments or requests you may have by following the 'Comment' link below. I do try to answer all comments I receive

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?

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.

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.