End of Entourage
Goodbye, Entourage. This week I had my second major personal e-mail outage of the year. This time it was a silently corrupted identity in Entourage 2008. The symptom was that I stopped receiving mail. After several hours of diagnostics, I determined that Entourage could sync almost any folder with our Exchange server except the Inbox folder. I rebuilt my Office 2008 database (successfully, unlike last time), but the problem persisted.
I used one of my two free Office 2008 tech support calls with Microsoft to determine that the root cause of this was a corrupted identity, which can not be repaired. This despite the fact that the database tool could not find any corruptions. Their answer was to build a new identity, then export my 12000 e-mail messages from the old identity to the new one.
I asked about whether this could happen again, and the answer I got was "it depends. Some people have this happen more frequently than others.". As a manager with close to 40 people on my team and a variety of cross-functional responsibilities, my single most important work tool (besides my voice) is e-mail. I simply cannot afford the reliability problems I've had with Entourage 2008 in the last four months.
Therefore, I decided to export my old mail to Mail.app instead, and try it an iCal for a while. I ran into some problems with Entourage creating .mbox files that Mail gave up on reading partway through. The answer to that was to download Thunderbird 2.0 and use it to read the Entourage .mbox files, then let Mail.app import the Thunderbird .mbox files instead. This works, and now I have my entire set of mail stored in Mail.app.
We'll see if I can get used to Mail's oddities relatively quickly. I will miss how Entourage remembered the last ~20 folders I'd moved messages to, and made moving more messages to one of the same folders easier than it is in Mail. I won't miss that in Entourage dragging a message from the inbox to another folder copied it rather than moving it. I wont' miss Entourage's inability to create real HTML links in e-mail messages (where the text displayed is something other than the URL of the link).
Wish me luck.