I hate entourage

January 2, 2008 9:43 AM

Entourage on a mac, almost constant pinwheel. WTF?

We use entourage at work, and on my mac it barely works. I always get the spinning "pinwheel of death" and have to force quit regularly. Anyone overcome something like this? What worked?

posted by muscat to computers & internet (11 comments total)

What type of email system are you using? Exchange? POP?
posted by k8t at 9:47 AM on January 2, 2008

its an exchange server...
posted by muscat at 9:49 AM on January 2, 2008

Can you access OWA?
posted by k8t at 10:14 AM on January 2, 2008

For Entourage to work on an Exchange server, The following have to be enabled on the server side: Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 (with Service Pack 2 or later) or later. HTTP DAV (Outlook Web Access), and LDAP.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:25 AM on January 2, 2008

I know exactly what you're talking about. It spends most of it's time with the spinning wheel, if it weren't stuck like that it would be fine.

I did a couple of things which seem to have fixed it. I took the entourage dbs out of quicksilver/spotlight, this helped a little, but the big thing I did was move stuff from the exchange folders to folder on my local box.

If your inbox and I deleted folders on the exchange server get too big, entourage will spend all it's time updating them. So either pare down what's in those boxes, or copy them elsewhere.
You might also be able to move that stuff to other folder on exchange and get entourage to not sync them; not sure about that.
posted by jefftang at 10:39 AM on January 2, 2008

Keep stuff in local folders, try to delete emails with large attachments when you are done with them. Remove from spotlight, etc.

Launch entourage holding down option, and it will bring up the database wizard, with the options to verify / repair / compact your databases. When done it will force entourage to resync all your data with exchange, so you may want to log into the OWA in safari or firefox and clean up your inbox server side first, so you are only downloading 500 messages from your inbox, instead of 5,000.
posted by mrzarquon at 11:15 AM on January 2, 2008

Moving your emails regularly from your Exchange inbox to local folders will help immensely.
posted by infinitewindow at 11:35 AM on January 2, 2008

I have the same exact problem with Entourage for the Mac (as I'm sure most people who use it do). My problem stems from the fact that my address book/database is huge ... almost 15,000 entires.

If you have a large database like me then here's an important tip : in the address book window, ALWAYS keep things arranged by "Name". You can arrange it temporarily by another field if a task you're doing requires it, but put it back to "Name" when you're done. If you have Entourage sorting your address book by anything other than "Name" you will constantly see the dreaded spinning beach ball, even if you don't have the address book window open. I have no idea why this is, but after given this tip by a friend within Microsoft my beach ball sightings have decreased (though I still see it often enough to have me leaving the program for a Mail.app/GMail/IMAP solution).
posted by General Zubon at 11:37 AM on January 2, 2008

Entourage is a PowerPC application and is not universal (unless you've found a beta copy of Office 2008). Odds are, you have an Intel Mac, and using Rosetta. That's going to take a hit. I've found that Office in general is much less stable on an Intel Mac compared to a PPC Mac. You might be stuck with crappy performance until Office 2008 comes out and is adopted by your company.

Disclaimer: I don't use Entourage.
posted by jeversol at 1:57 PM on January 2, 2008

Like others, I deal with this every day. I absolutely loathe the application. Fortunately, it seems like most of the issues will be solved with Office 2008 (which looks to be quite decent).

I'm just trying to bear with it until I can upgrade. As soon as it's announced, I'll be banging on my bosses door for a copy.
posted by aladfar at 2:31 PM on January 2, 2008

You might also try rebuilding the database. Entourage has really crappy file storage management, so your email file (yes, its one big file) can get pretty huge unless you compact it on a semi-regular base it.
posted by softlord at 7:10 PM on January 2, 2008