File this item under “little gems.”
With the help of a plug-in, the Finder can display the contents of Entourage mail messages without having to open them in Entourage. Shin-ichi Kawamura has posted Entourage QuickLook Plug-In ver. 1.1 as a free download on his website.
The website and the included Readme.rtf file are in Japanese but I needed no translation to tell me when I opened the .dmg file that I simply need to drag and drop the Entourage QuickLook Plug-In.qlgenerator file into the /Library/QuickLook folder. Installation is that simple. If you’re not an administrator on your Mac and do not have privileges to install items into the main Library folder then you can place the plug-in inside ~/Library/QuickLook where “~” is your own home folder. You will need to create the QuickLook folder if it doesn’t already exist.
No restart is required and the next search will immediately take advantage of the new plug-in. In the Finder select the Find... command from the File menu. In the Search box enter text for your search. Be sure to search “This Mac” and “Contents”. Locate an Entourage message file and select it. Tap the spacebar to view the contents of the message.
Note that the plug-in is not actually reading the Entourage Database. Instead it is reading the Spotlight cache files generated by the Microsoft Database Daemon for Entourage. These files are found in your home folder in ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/. If your searches are not returning Entourage messages then make sure the Include Entourage items in Spotlight search results preference is chosen in Entourage’s preferences.
The plug-in cleanly formats all messages as plain text whether or not they are plain text or HTML. HTML formatting, pictures, etc., will not appear in the Quick Look window.
Entourage QuickLook Plug-In ver. 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Entourage 2008.
Comments (3)
Posted on March 26, 2008 08:36
PF:I could not get this work in Entourage 2004. Is it only for 2008?
Posted by PF | March 26, 2008 8:36 AM
Posted on March 26, 2008 09:22
William SmithYes, the plug-in is only for Entourage 2008 although I would imagine a similar plug-in could be written for Entourage 2004. It simply needs to read the file extension for the 2004 cache files.
I've emailed the author about this blog post and maybe with enough interest he will create a second plug-in.
Posted by William Smith
|
March 26, 2008 9:22 AM
Posted on April 14, 2008 05:20
Adam :This is nice but would be nice if within entourage you could tap the spacebar to view the attachment within entourage itself - and if only spotlight in entourage was like Mail - fast and easy !
Posted by Adam | April 14, 2008 5:20 AM