I myself could never entrust my precious email to Entourage, precisely because of its proprietary database format. I had some bad RAM corrupt my database once, and that was that — poof! All my email, gone…

Never again!

Anyone interested in my quest for the perfect Mac email app might be interested in this post on my own site:

http://www.andrewcurrie.ca/index.php/weblog/comments/allaboutemailformacosx/

That sucks, Andrew. Entourage is notorious for crap like that.

Having said that, I’d personally never rely on POP mail for that very reason—regardless of apps. I currently pipe all my email (about 10 active accounts in various places + 30ish domain catchalls + Gmail) through a single IMAP account (Fastmail. Love them.). Takes a lot of the peril out of email. Can’t imagine going back at this point.

I just wish there were a sturdy analogue of IMAP for calendar events. That would be gold.

[n.b. - Fair warning. Let’s not make this a generic (Entourage|Microsoft|Whatever)-bashing thread. Please keep comments on the topic of how you’re using linking. Thanks.]

Google ‘CalDAV’ for at least one up-and-coming “IMAP for calendars”. (for example, http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-dusseault-caldav-01.html). Unlike the “put a file on a disk somewhere” model of iCal, it actually tries to use extensions to the WebDAV protocol to support various calendar object thingees (alarms, invites, etc).

Nice, Gregg.

I haven’t touched iCal (or its underlying protocol) for probably a year. At one point I was trying to manage half a dozen projects with it, and it became really frustrating that you were either THE owner or THE user with no privileges or communication in between.

Would be great to see something that’s an open protocol (and usable on virtually any hosted box—tough with WebDAV) that lets an administrator grant access to users at varying degrees.

Thanks.

This sounds like a great opportunity for some Applescript!

Write a script to do exactly that, save it as an application, then drop that in as a link in the recurring reminder.

Now when you get the reminder you just have to run it!

… or, even better, schedule the Applescript to run with cron or similar.

Yay automation!

Andrew and Merlin,

Straight up, I’m the guy in charge of the databse for Entourage…

Andrew, I read your post, interesting stuff in there. In defense of the Entourage database, it has come a long way since E2001. 5 years of changes, most of which were centered around making sure that we never end up with a database that ate all of your mail. I have yet to see a 2004 database that couldn’t be repaired at least to a point where you could export all of the records in it.

Merlin, have you lost any data with the latest Entourage?

Merlin, have you lost any data with the latest Entourage?

I’m happy to say I have not.

I do recall having had a number of unsavory experiences in a previous version, but not with this one. I do still backup neurotically. The reports I get from people—some anecdotal and probably just the same stuff you hear—has historically come down to three issues:

1. Database gets HUGE pretty fast under certain circumstances (I have friends claiming theirs tops 2GB)
2. Database crashes or gets corrupted easier than people would like, resulting in data loss
3. The proprietary format makes people crazy (this very much includes me). “Why I can’t I touch my stuff? Why does ‘exporting’ mean ‘archiving? I just want to see my mail!…!”

These may seem inaccurate today, but I did learn my lesson a couple times on previous versions. If you have information you’d like to share, or suggestions for beating corruption problems, do it. Since I guess I’m resigned to this thread veering wildly off-topic, feel free to respond here or via email.

(And tell Mr. Ruff to bring me down there some day; I have a list of feature ideas longer than your arm. :-) )

Merlin, give me a date that you can make it to lunch in Mountain View and we’ll arrange something. I’ll also be up in the city a couple days during WWDC if you’d like to meet up in the second week of June (perhaps we can get Jud to join us as well).

Hi all,

Just checking back in…

Yeah, didn’t mean to Entourage-bash. Mailsmith’s database terrifies me just as much. Heck, even the few lines of XML that Mail.app 2.0 supposedly adds to each and every email for Spotlight indexing scares me!

I never saw that option before until you mention it now. Great! I immediately put the backup thing in a recurring Calendar event.

One “link” trick I often use is with the Applescripts that make it easy to “create task from message”. I have changed it a bit so not the whole message ends up in the task details, just the subject becomses the title. Automatically the email is linked to the task so when I need it (reference material) when going through the tasklist I do not have to click to the appropriate folder.