I’m trying to import several dozen Entourage mail folders in DTPO. They’re structured as
Clients
–Client 1
–Client 2
–Client 3
–etc.
Currently, I’m only able to import one folder at a time, which is going to make this a very tedious process. Also, when I do the import, the modify date on the rtf document is today, not the date of the email, which is what I thought the behavior would be.
Any insights into either of these?
TIA,
Robert Floyd
Hi, Robert:
I don’t have Entourage on my MacBook Pro, and haven’t checked on my Power Mac G5, which does have Entourage mail archived. But I think my Entourage archive behaves like my Apple Mail when archived using DTPO.
The creation date of Mail messages is the date they were sent.
Yes, currently only one mailbox at a time can be selected.
I didn’t break down my mailboxes that way, but can do a search by name of sender or recipient. Or I can do a Phrase search in the "From: " or "To: " header, then sort by name.
So far I’ve archived more than 19,000 Entourage messages. 
Thank goodness that attachments are brought over in the archive. One of my old colleagues had the habit of attaching the body of his messages as a Word file, so the older DT Pro scripts left his messages as total mysteries.
I just imported a folder with two messages: one sent 7/4/2000 and one sent 3/7/2001. In DTPO, the modified date for both messages is 11/29/06. Why isn’t the modified date the date the messages were sent?
EDIT: Never mind. I didn’t have the Date Created column showing in the view.
It would still be nice for an import to handle subfolders. I’m talking about importing close to 100 folders. Yuck.
ONE MORE ONCE: Why does the import take Exchange offline? I don’t mind it doing so, but it should at least bring it back online afterwards.
Or at the VERY least, present a dialog box stating that Entourage is being taken offline! I didn’t recognize that until I checked mail from another machine (my Palm Treo) and found about twenty messages that I hadn’t seen on my laptop… surprise!!!
Yeah, me too.
And with the delayed response (documented in another posting), that means I have to click on a folder… wait up to an hour… then be available in front of my computer to click on “Import”… wait more hours… then be available to do it all over again. Aren’t computers supposed to eliminate work?
I guess I should do this on the couch while watching movies or something. But, I agree… yuck.
A nice recursive AppleScript, someone? Pretty please?
About the delays, I’ll speculate this may be most noticeable when the archive process is started with little free memory available.
I’ve noticed some delays when running mail archive on my MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM, when I’m down to little free memory. But on my Power Mac G5 with 5 GB RAM, everything goes more quickly.
So when I wish to do Mail archive on the MacBook Pro, if I’ve got limited free memory I quit and then relaunch DT Pro Office. Everything goes more quickly. Mailboxes are archived much faster than under the older DT Pro scripts.
Note: I archive emails into a new database. As I’m pulling in over 20,000 emails, that keeps my main database from “ballooning” to a slowdown size.
yeah, lack of automatic sub folder import is going to be problematic for me as well. I’m considering upgrading, but I’m not sold yet. Lack of being able to specify multiple folders, or lack of sub folder integration will make regular archival a royal pain. I’m not sure this is the right solution for me as presently constituted.
Bill, how are you using this functionality? Do you delete from your email client the emails you archive?
I plan to delete the archived messages from my email clients, but haven’t yet done that.
The advantage of archiving into a DT database is much faster content searching. In other posts I’ve noted that one can, using Phrase searches, search by “From: …”, “To: …” and “Subject: …”.
Note that the creation date of archived messages is the Sent date. So it’s easy to sort messages by that date.
If I was using Entourage, I would DEFINITELY be importing into DT for accelerated searching. But I use PowerMail, which has as one of its benefits very fast searching. As long as I do my regular database maintenance (have it automated through QuicKeys), content searching is essentially as fast as DT.
My thinking is the value for me in archiving may be to manage the size of my email database. It’s not a problem now. That may not be the case in 5 years. If I can replicate my folder structure in DT and then archive by date range so I move older emails out of PM and into DT, that may be an effective solution.
But again, the lack of subfolder integration makes that problematic. To go through each individual subfolder and do it is not something I relish. And it is something I certainly would not do on a regular basis, which kind of defeats the purpose of archiving. I would turn it into a ‘once every 6 months’ kind of thing.
I’ve been looking for an archival system, just not sure this is it.
so I guess one of my questions for the developers is this:
does the current paradigm you are using to accomplish the archiving automatically preclude the ability to include sub folders or is there a possibility this functionality may be included in a subsequent release?
haven’t heard from the developers on this one, am guessing they missed the question because they are excellent at responding to these types of queries. So just re-requesting an answer to the question above about whether it’s possible at some point we’ll see the ability to automatically archive sub-folders or if given the current architecture that is impossible.
A lot of things are going on in the background when you click on a folder in the Mail Import window. With a hierarchy of folders the user experience may not be so great (depending on the number of messages but I like to see everything worst case). But of course we try to improve the user experience so who knows what will happen? We do listen and the request has been noted.
I had no trouble importing Entourage mail that had folders and sub-folders to a second and third level. I remove all attachments before importing, and that may help.
What I’m referring to is when you could select all messages of a hierarchy of folders by clicking on the top level and you see all the messages contained in the subfolders in the table. (I think that is what the original poster meant). This would use a lot of system resources and I don’t think everybody has a lot of RAM and superfast processors.
I missed this one:
It will bring it online as soon as you close the Mail Import window or choose a different Mail Source. The reason is that you don’t want the current snapshot to change under your feet since that could cause nasty problems.
I’d thought that our documentation would mention this but I see now that it didn’t make it to the final copy.
Maybe I should add in big fat blinken lights: “Entourage is offline!” as a reminder in the status area?
yeah, to clarify, if I have a structure of:
folder one
subfolder 1
subfolder 2
subfolder 3
and each one has emails in it, I’d like to be able to specify I want to import folder 1 and include subfolders and have that single import get all of it.
I just ran exactly that kind of import and had no trouble at all: DTPO exactly replicates the folder structure of my Entourage DB. I have to import a folder at a time, but the sub-folders go right where they should be. (I archive mail in a separate database, and I have eliminated all attachments before importing.)
howarth…i know I can do it one folder/subfolder at a time, but THAT is the problem. I have an extensive folder/sub-folder structure and keeping them all current and having to manually import each one is not a task I relish. Would take me a LOT of time to do each one separately.
I want to be able to specify one folder, specify ‘include subfolders’, then push the button and get them all in one archive session.
“keeping them all current” I don’t quite understand. It sounds as though you want to have both Entourage and DTPO in synch, as duplicates of each other?
Or else you keep folders in a topical arrangement: mine are chronological, by year and month. Instead of sorting mail into folders, I append new folders for the latest mail.
Thus I want to move old mail out of Entourage and into DTPO, where the searching and AI are far better. After I archive e-mail in DT, I delete it from Entourage.
Well, to be truthful, I archive the Entourage folders as mbox files. They are backup–to read them, just drag back into Entourage. Like Bill DeVille, I want belt-and-suspenders protection!
poor choice of phrase on my part. Don’t want to keep them in sync, but what I would probably do is archive on a monthly basis into the same folder structure and then delete the archived date range of emails from my email client. I just am not going to go do that for every single sub folder once a month, or even once a quarter. The pain in the butt factor is too high.
And my email client (PowerMail) searches extremely quickly, basically as fast as DT. I’d be using archive to manage the size of that database.
But at this point, I’m not seeing the functionality I need to warrant the upgrade expense.