The Entourage Help Blog

“All of my messages are moving to the Inbox [or some other place unexpected]!”

Entourage’s junk E-mail protection isn’t perfect and occasionally marks good messages as spam. A false positive message in Entourage 2004 could be unflagged as spam by using the Not Junk button. This resulted in a Junk E-mail Protection window with four options.

The new Junk E-mail Protection window now only sports three options.

The Create a mailing list rule option is now gone from the Junk E-mail Protection window. Hallelujah! Entourage 2004 users would often select this option not understanding what it was doing. Be default it would move everything to the Inbox (On My Computer) folder including messages from IMAP and Exchange Server accounts.

This one change alone will probably reduce the number of questions in the Microsoft Entourage newsgroup by a dozen per month.

“I installed Entourage 2004 on my brand new Mac. But all my outgoing mail says I’m an Office 2004 Test Drive User.”

All new Macs have included the Office 2004 Test Drive for folks to test Office for themselves. After purchasing and installing Office 2004 the Test Drive remained and would cause lots of problems. Some MVPs have even likened it to a virus—difficult to remove from your computer and the source of lots of Office problems.

The Office 2008 installer now includes a feature to remove not only the Office Test Drive but all earlier versions of Office. This is optional but highly recommended. Anyone who had to repeatedly use the Remove Office tool to fully eliminate the Office Test Drive and then spend the time to reinstall Office 2004 and apply all the updates will appreciate this addition to the Office Installer.

“How do I sort my Contacts by last name [or first name]?”

In Entourage 2004 you couldn’t.

But in Entourage 2008 you can now add both First Name and Last Name columns for sorting by selecting them from the Columns sub-menu under the View menu.

“HTML E-mails display with jumbled fonts!”

The CreativeTechs.com website has posted The Fix for Garbled Text in Entourage Email! This tip explains how to delete the Tasman Browser.cache file, which was often the culprit for garbled text in HTML messages received in Entourage.

The Tasman Browser was the proprietary engine for Internet Explorer 5.0 for Macintosh as well as Entourage 2004. Now, Entourage 2008 and the new calendar/task management application My Day both use WebKit, the same engine that powers Safari and OmniWeb. While the change of engines won’t eliminate the potential for font cache problems, this particular problem is eliminated.

However, be aware that new problems can now surface. If Apple makes a significant change in its implementation of WebKit, the potential to break both Entourage 2008 and My Day increases.

“If I rebuild my Entourage database then I lose all my categories and links!”

Not anymore with Entourage 2008!

Entourage 2004 would sometimes report that its database needed to be repaired but the repair always resulted in the loss of categories, links, the newsgroup cache and potentially projects, rules or mailing list rules.

Entourage 2008 has been developed to preserve all meta-data between rebuilds of the database.

“How do I make Entourage my default E-mail client instead of Apple’s Mail?”

Setting Entourage 2004 as the default E-mail client required a very unintuitive process: open the Mail application’s General preferences and choose Microsoft Entourage from the Default email reader drop-down menu.

Now, Entourage 2008 offers a button in its preferences to set itself as the default E-mail application. Select the Preferences... menu item from the Entourage menu. Under General Preferences click the Set Entourage to be my default e-mail client button.

“Entourage 2004 is slow on my Intel Mac!”

One of the most touted features of Office 2008, including Entourage 2008, is that it is now Universal (Intel native) and no longer runs under Rosetta. That doesn’t mean it will run differently on PowerPC Macs. It now has the code built into it to support both platforms natively.

“How do I remove the Conversation header when I print E-mails? I don’t need this.”

The Conversation header at the top of printed E-mail messages was far more useless than helpful. Most of the time it was the same as the Subject header, which was already included at the top of the page.

With Entourage 2008 this is no longer included on printed messages. Unfortunately, it’s also not an option if you do want it printed. I don’t think many folks will miss it, however.

The Conversation header has been replaced by a From header, which is much more useful, and the overall size of the header information has been reduced a few point sizes allowing for more of the body text on the page.

[Updated: January 16, 2008, 7:00 p.m. CST]

“Fonts keep shrinking in my messages with Outlook users!”

This problem stems from Entourage 2004 referencing fonts by pixels rather than points when sending HTML messages. Entourage 2008 now references fonts by points. Entourage 2004 also had an “adjustment” calculation that made text larger when viewed on Mac OS X but then adjusted the size before sending.

That calculation is gone in Entourage 2008, which means similar fonts from Windows users will often come across appearing smaller on Mac OS X because of resolution differences between the two platforms. This results in Entourage users increasing their point sizes for readability and then sending messages that appear with larger type on Windows. It’s a Catch 22.

Unfortunately, this may become a problem when sending between Entourage 2004 and Entourage 2008 users.

This is by far not an exhaustive list but just a few small changes that I’m sure will make some Entourage 2004 users who are upgrading very happy. If you discover a change from Entourage 2004 to Entourage 2008 that improves your experience, please add a comment to let others know about it.