The measly 350MB mailbox quota allotted by my corporate IT department has me being creative with the storage of my email. Many of the other information workers I know suffer the same plight. If you are a Microsoft Entourage (the Mac OS X cousin to Microsoft Outlook) like me and like to avoid paying for tools (like EEAX or MailSteward), I hope this how-to helps assuage your mail storage, archival and backup woes. In my opinion, how to Archive Your Data by Microsoft Entourage Help and other articles like “In Entourage, how do I archive my mail?” do a mediocre job of informing us about the caveats involved in archiving mail. The two native export options I’ll speak of are:
- archive Entourage mail using mbox files
- an mbox file contains a set of mail messages that you can import back into Entourage or into some other mail applications.
- archive Entourage mail using .rge archives
- an Entourage archive file (.rge) can contain email messages, contacts, events, notes, tasks, and project files.
- .rge files have high compression ratios, which saves on your disk space.
I promulgate using the latter of these options to archive your Entourage mail is the solution of choice and here’s how I suggest doing so:
Suggested Solution
To clean up your mailbox in a comprehensive Time Machine and Spotlight-friendly way, use a combination of Mail Views (Saved Searches), a .rge archive and multiple identities. To ready your mail for archiving, you’ll first want to organize mail for export. Entourage will export data, but in a limited number of ways. One way to do this is by creating and assigning a category to your mail. Like others before me, I’ve chosen to archive my mail on an annual basis (I don’t know why, since I reach my mail quota well ahead of reaching the end of the year – I may need to archive every 6 months).
1. Use Categories to Organize Email for Export
I suggest creating two custom Mail Views (last group in the folders pane, below Microsoft News Server) one for Received Mail and for Sent Mail.
- To create a mail view for Received Mail, select the folder you want to search in (probably your Inbox), then go to to Edit > Advanced Search (⌥⌘ F)
- Set the option to “Match if any criteria are met”
- From the dropdown, set “Date Received”
- From the next dropdown, set “Greater Than” and then enter the preferred email age. This will find all email older than the specified number of days in the date received field. In the example screenshot, I was 151 days into the 365 day year when creating this archive.
- Entourage will find all the matching mail. Scroll through and make sure all the mail you want is in the view and from all the folders you wish to archive. Save the search.
- Repeat steps 1-5 for your Sent Items using the parameters “Date Sent”, “Greater Than”, <number of days>”.
2. Create an “Archive” Category
Once you’ve verified these two mail views to filter out the mail you wish to archive, create a new category to put them in.
- Go to Edit > Categories > Edit Categories and edit your categories to make an “Archive” category
- Right-click on your Mail Views, then assign your new category “Archive” to those items.
3. Export Mail to .rge Archive
- Go to File > Export
- Select the option to export “Items that are in a category”.
- Choose your custom “Archive” category. Then select the item types, mail, tasks, etc., that you want to archive
4. Create Another Identity
If you want quick access to your archived mail, I suggest creating a new Identity that will allow you to quickly “Switch Identities” to view old mail.
Identity Creation Option 1
|
Identity Creation Option 2
You may want to drag and drop your folders from the auto-created Archive.rge folder into folders within your existing Inbox structure. |
Now you can switch back and forth between identities (Switch Identities ⌥⌘ Q) if you want to access an archive. Here’s why using the latter two solutions are a poor choice:
Alternative Solution
- Create a custom Mail View you can drag any view out of Entourage to create an .mbox file of the messages in that view.
The message Received timestamp is lost on export.
Use a combination of Mail Views and MBOX file(s). Once your mail is organized into a categorical, meaningful saved searched, simply click and drag the view to your desktop. This creates an MBOX file (which can be opened with a text editor if you don’t mind reading through Internet headers in your mail and HTML converted to plain-text). Dragging mail to an MBOX file does not remove the mail from your mailbox. If you want to free up space in your mailbox, you’ll need to delete the contents of your Mail View separately.
Drag your MBOX files into a new Identity, then switch Identities to search old mail. This keeps your regular database lean and more responsive.
12 Responses to “How To Archive Entourage 2008 Mail using Multiple Identities”
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July 2nd, 2009 at 3:48 pm
What about just moving your Exchange mails into a paralel folder structure on the "On My Computer" machine itself. That's what I do. It's a pain since you have to move them all manually, but it maintains the timestamps and everything. I guess that at one point, I will consume my HDD
July 2nd, 2009 at 11:36 am
Yes, creating a copy of your Identity through the filesystem works well, but does just that – creates a copy. In order to complete your archive (removing mail from your server-side Exchange mailbox), you'll need to either remove old mail messages from your current Identity using a custom Mail View (execute step 4 under Identity Creation Option 1 above) or make sure the "delete items from Entourage after they are archived" option is checked when Exporting mail. Here's a mail export screenshot.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Seems like a really elegant solutions. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me… when I try to export my 'archive' category, it tells me there is nothing to export! Even though the mail views clearly show all my old mail in there. Back to dragging mbox files I guess… sigh.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
How frustrating. Loss of each email's timestamp (date sent/received) on import of an mbox file is no fun. I suppose the Error Log provides no additional clues as to why the export wizard sees your 'archive' category as empty
August 12th, 2009 at 7:11 am
When i first did it i had the same problem but then i realised that when you click on the saved search and categories.. you had to click on ASSIGN CATEGORIES which opened up a different window where you ticked the box of what you wanted to assign it to.
It then worked for me.
March 5th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
You have to select all of the email in the mail view and then assign category.
April 27th, 2010 at 8:46 pm
My employer is using Symantec's Enterprise Vault to archive messages, first as "stubs" (limited to 512 characters) with a link to the full message on a separate archive server, then as "expired" (the stubs are removed from the active inbox and the archived messages can only be found through a special search tool), then "expunged". Employer claims that this fulfills two needs – (1) to save money on expensive Exchange server storage space and (2) our general counsel wants to limit the amount of email evidence they have to provide to three years. They only run Exchange and IMAP (actively block POP on the network) and I suspect that IMAP will be going away soon.
Many of my clients want an automated way to save every message locally and none of the suggestions here are accomplishing that.
The corporate archiving process is mostly on a timetable.
"Stubbing" happens after 14 days, "expired" is after 18 months and "expunged" is after 36 months.
But, a message with a large attachment (and my employer calls anything over 256K "large") can be "stubbed" in three days or just a few hours (may depend upon the size of the attachment).
So the problem is how to automate local archiving so that (a) all messages are saved completely, and (b) the automation process does not allow the server to reach into the local archives to reduce the usefulness of the local copy. And this has to work all of the time – even when my clients are away from their computer on weekends, for conferences or on vacation.
I created some filters/rules that were working for the "stubs" – keeping local copies and preventing the server from replacing them with stubs. But the expiration process stumped me – it's deleting the messages from the active spool and also from my archives (what header can you filter for when the message is just plain gone?).
I'm stumped. I've purchased four of Softhings' products to test on various Mac platforms, but I haven't found a way to automate the process of local archiving. Any recommendations?
April 29th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Very interesting. I do know of a few folks who've used this AutoArchive script. A couple co-workers have written their own scripts to auto-archive (similar to how the AutoArchive script above works).
May 31st, 2010 at 10:44 pm
This is a great post. I have a quick question:
Do you have to do this for every folder? My problem is in the "On My Computer" I have about 15 forlders some with sub-folders. Do I have to create a search for each?
June 1st, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Hey Mike, Good question. No, you don't have to do this for every folder. You'll use your Mail View to specify which messages you'd like to archive (whether those messages are within the same folder or not).
June 1st, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Thanks, this worked well, and solved my problem. I started to get the dreaded error "Microsoft Sync Services has found an Error. And will close". It caused some sort of memory leak, and each time it slowed my Mac down by adding 20Mb to its memory needs. It was hard to find the solution: I shut down sync services on Entourage, and still got it. Deleted all contacts in Entourage – and still got it. Eventually I found the problem. There was some sort of corrupt entry in the address book, which showed up in the count of contacts, but would not show up in the list – and it was impossible to delete it. I worked hard to rebuild index but it did not fix. So I abandoned that identity, using it just as an archive and moved over what I needed using your tips above. Now I have new working identity that syncs again with ical, address book and my iphone. Microsoft, if you are reading this, please find a way of allowing users to "flush" the entire address book when needed. I suspect the calendar might also have same issue.
October 16th, 2010 at 2:02 am
It want to keep all my Entourage Rules and signatures intact.
Which method i should use. It seems RGE file may affect the rules.