Technology will be the death of me. It’s the simplest things that go the most wrong. E-mail. Well, Microsoft e-mail.
In defence of Apple, this is plainly a Microsoft problem, I’ve had a pile of problems with Outlook 2008 on Windows – mostly where the whole PC would hang when receiving new email. I don’t think I was alone in seeing that problem.
Anyway, back to my world of MacBook Air and, to recap:
– I’d set up all of my email, migrating thousands of old mails from my PC, via Thunderbird and using all kinds of odd scripts. I just checked and I migrated around 25,000 mails for a grand total of 3.49GB
– My MacBook Air crashed, rendering the office database corrupt and unusable. Attempts to rebuild it all failed at stage 4 of 5.
– I tried re-installing Office 2008, to no gain
_ Eventually I found the “main identity” files (in your user folder, under “Microsoft User Data” and deleted everything. That cleared the problem and I was free to work with a blank slate on Entourage
– I installed Thunderbird on my Mac and moved all of my email into it. Then I killed off a pile of old email in sent and inbox (having secured a backup first) and exported just 3,000 email to Entourage compatible files
– I set up Entourage all over again. And did a database compaction (is that even a word in this context?) which reduced the mailbox size from 1.2GB to 327MB (and even handily took a backup) Surely that would be ok for Entourage to handle?
– Within an hour it had crashed. or, at least, it removed the “quit” option from the Entourage menu whilst letting me use other emails. The database utility popped up and said my database was corrupt again, but that it couldn’t quit Entourage so I needed to do something about it. I got the feeling its knickers were in a twist – kind of an error message tone thing.
– So, with great trepidation, I force quit Entourage. And fired up the database rebuild. In no time it had completed, without errors this time.
– I opened Entourage and found all of my email there, safe and sound. But when I tried to send an email, Entourage told me that I first needed to create an email account. It seems the rebuild had deleted all of my account set up details.
This thing gets one more chance. I’m a patient guy. I’ll give it 3 strikes. And then it’s back to thunderbird. Meanwhile, I’m leaving all of my emails on the server.
Proceed with absolute caution if you are considering Entourage as your main client. Proceed with real, real caution.
