Just a quick update:
Tried another test. I created a new folder in Entourage and slowly added messages to it. Each time after adding messages, I check to see whether DTPO would import them or not. The results:
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Importing 160 messages worked.
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Importing 211 messages worked.
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Importing 305 messages worked.
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Importing 388 messages worked.
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Importing 473 messages worked.
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Importing 526 messages worked (took only 2 minutes to ‘load’ messages, which is where the process has been hanging in my experiences above in earlier posts).
I’ll keep going, but will do a bigger increase in the number of messages to import this time:
- Importing 733 messages worked. Hmm…
Keep going…
- Importing 781 messages (the full month of Feb ‘received email’ in my database) DIDN’T work.
A-ha. Interestingly, those last few emails that I added to the folder (before trying step
were from 28 Feb 2006. Not sure if one of them had a problem or not, so I tried another experiment. I took 750 messages from March, thinking that maybe there’s a magical number between 733 and 781 where I’m having problems.
Tried to import the all 750 in fell swoop. That worked fine. Only took two minutes to load the messages.
So, my first thought was that there is something about some email that I received on 28 Feb that DTPO just doesn’t like. I took all email received on 28 Feb (47 items) and put it in a separate folder and tried to import them. Didn’t work. Fans screaming. DTPO locks up.
Right, so I’ve isolated the problem. Now to look at those 47 emails:
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the biggest one is 430K.
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11 have attachments (file types are either .doc or .pdf, with some .gif files from HTML email)
Overall, nothing terribly remarkable about any of them.
I removed the 11 with attachments to see if the remaining 36 emails without attachments would be read/loaded by DTPO. They loaded no problem.
So, it must be one of the attachments. Just to be sure, I took the 11 messages with attachments and tried to import them as a group. Didn’t work. Definitely one of the attachments/emails. You can see where this is going.
One-by-one, I tried to import each of the 11. All but one were loaded fine. The very last one contained a .pdf attachment announcing a conference in Turkey. I can open the attachment fine now, and the message itself is unremarkable and written in plain text. It is no value to me now (I didn’t go to the conference in case anyone is wondering), so I deleted.
As a final test, I now have 47 email messages from 28 Feb 2006, so tried to ‘load’ these. No problem.
Right, so I was able to isolate the problem, but the bigger question is how often am I going to have to do this for the 10K messages I have in my entourage database for 2006 (and that’s just my INBOX, not counting the 8K sent items).
Very tired, but curiously satisfied…