I use Microsoft Entourage for most of my emailing, calendar, to do list and address book purposes.
Lately, my whole computer has been slow, in small/large part to having too many files on the hard drive.
And Entourage has had, for about 1 month, some kind of odd database error that I’ve been diagnosing and perhaps fixed by rebuilding. We’ll see. I just went through all of my spam emails, all of my mailing list emails, all of my subscribed unreads, and all of my Deckchairs spam. It amounted to over 10,000 emails and I just deleted all of them. I’ll either go straight to technology hell or efficiency heaven. G-d help me.
Postscript: After many hours of researching the error I had, which was generally around the full deletion of emails in my Deleted folder, there are two key sources of information:
Plan A: The fine folks at this MVPS page indicate that this error could be a result of a bad email and I’ve been convinced that this was the case for many weeks. The solution I used was to turn off the Preview pane in Entourage and then go to Tools > Run Schedule > Empty Deleted Items. This essentially forced the database to kill the bad email and everything seems, seems to be okay.
Plan B:: This link will take you to Microsoft’s solution which is not lovely. They basically tell you to back everything up, export all of your data, and then open a whole new account in Entourage and import your old data. I was not looking forward to this and the question in my mind was whether, if I had to export all data (emails, contact, calendar items, and todos) would I just go straight to Apple’s Mail.app, Address Book, iCal, and OmniOutliner or try to reinvent my existence in Entourage. I’m glad I didn’t have to make the decision. If you ever do, take a look at this healthy discussion of Mac email clients at TUAW.
Sorry to bore.