The Entourage Help Blog

Would you be able to tweak the script that it will process multiple messages at once. I'd love to be able to batch a group of messages every month until Microsoft fixes this.

Great! The end of my frustration. Batch conversion would be a nice addition.
Thank you!

Excellent, thank you William!

I've noticed that once the emails are converted and everything re-synced, that the converted messages now have the conversion date and time (actually only when viewed on my iPhone. Entourage and Outlook do the right thing). It isn't tragic, just a little weird...and possibly only seen on my setup...

Thanks william, worked for me... will be a big help for others in my organisation. Thanks again.

I've experienced this exact problem with messages sent from my iPhone 3G and viewed in Entourage 2004. Thanks for the script which I will try. I'm also wondering if another issue I am having is related. This morning I launched Entourage and got an error message that my database was corrupted and needed verifying. It then asked me if I wanted to rebuild it, which I did. At the end of the process, numerous old e-mails appeared in my outbox and got sent to several recipients confusing them and prompting them to write to me asking what was going on? i never had this problem prior to buying the iPhone a couple weeks ago. Comments welcome.

According to one MacBU developer, the workaround in the Microsoft KB article, which is to read the messages in OWA, does work. However, I've seen in two different Exchange Server 2003 systems where the messages simply don't appear in OWA. I'll be visiting MacBU in a little more than a week and hope to discuss this with him more. I'm hoping he can explain why this sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

However, for reasons I've already explained in this post, the problem is not a bug with Entourage. The problem is with munged headers. Entourage has not been programmed to interpret these munged headers as I suspect Outlook has been.

Nice work. Thank you very much for this. As some others mentioned, a method to batch process these messages would be fantastic.

Thanks for the background info on how the messages are mishandled. I was not able to get the script to work within entourage (2004) - it did not display the corrected message and when opting to save to the desktop, an error (...can't make desktop type constant) occurs. The script runs fine in the script editor, correcting and displaying the selected message, but when opting to save to the desktop, it errs again. Same behavior on two different machines (10.4.11, ent2004; must be something simple). Was able to edit the messages 'by hand', though, after seeing what was causing all the trouble.

Hi Michael!

I have no idea why the script would be getting slower. It simply reads what you've selected and acts only on that information.

You can also open the script in the Script Editor found in /Applications/AppleScript and run it directly from there. Saving it again may help.

Hope this helps!

Very welcome changes indeed, Karl! A lot of folks have been asking for this capability.

Thanks for your work! I'm sure folks will be appreciative. :-)

Hi,

Pasting the script as text in the previous forum message wasn't such a good idea after all, as some characters got lost. I did some more work on the script, removed a bug that prevents the script from running on non-Dutch version of Entourage, and uploaded it to Scriptbuilder.net
You can find MakeSentFromiPhoneReadable 1.0 at

http://scriptbuilders.net/files/makesentfromiphonereadable1.0.html

Hope it works for you too!

Gijs

I've downloaded the script and it works fine on my Mac. However I also use Outlook on a Windows pc (same server) and in the Outlook Sent items folder the item shows up with the date (i.e. today) that it was re-imported into Entourage when the mail item was actually sent six months ago and shows the six months ago date in Entourage

Any advice. Many thanks.

Bill,

So where do we complain about this. This is nuts to have this broken this long.

I noticed a few things while I tried to use the script provided by Gijs:
1. the initial dialog causes an error (on German Entourage 08). Removed it and it works.
2. the scripts looks for "iPod mail" in text. Needs to be updated to "iPhone mail" to work.
3. "iPhone mail" header was introduced by a newer iPhone firmware. Older mails do not have it
4. script searches for "Received: from" which is wrong for older mails (older firmware). Here you will find two blanks between ":" and "from"!

Otherwise I was able to "recover" all mails ;-)

Hope this helps!

Thomas

So, the scripts posted here work, but unfortunately they run very slowly on large messages when message sizes get larger than 50k or so. I guess it is a performance issue reading lines in Applescript. Anyway, I reworked the script where the heavy lifting is done by sed since all we need to do is strip off the offensive headers until the real headers start. The modified script runs orders of magnitude faster. Here it is:

tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
set theProcessedItemsCounter to 0
set theFaildItemsCounter to 0
set theExchangeAccount to item 1 of every Exchange account
set theSentbox to sent items folder of theExchangeAccount
set theSentMessages to current messages
set tmpfolderpath to (path to temporary items folder from user domain) as Unicode text

repeat with theMessage in theSentMessages
set theSource to source of theMessage

set theheader to headers of theMessage
if theheader contains "Subject" then
--return -- do not continue if this is a properly formatted message
else
try
set sourceMacPath to (tmpfolderpath & "entourage-message-" & theProcessedItemsCounter)
set sourcePosixPath to POSIX path of sourceMacPath
set fd to open for access sourceMacPath with write permission
set eof of fd to 0
write theSource to fd
close access fd

-- translate mac to unix line endings
set targetPosixPath to (sourcePosixPath & ".unix")
do shell script "tr '\\r' '\\n' " & targetPosixPath

-- get rid of the malformed headers
set fixedMessagePath to (sourcePosixPath & ".fixed")
do shell script "sed -e '1,/^$/d' " & targetPosixPath & " > " & fixedMessagePath

-- read in the corrected message
tell application "Finder"
set fd to POSIX file fixedMessagePath as alias
set newSource to (read fd)
end tell
set theEntourageMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {source:newSource}
move theEntourageMessage to theSentbox
set properties of theEntourageMessage to {color:{0, 0, 0}, priority:normal, read status:read, delivery status:sent, replied to:false, redirected:false, forwarded:false, connection action:keep on server, flagged:false}

-- clean up
do shell script "rm " & sourcePosixPath
do shell script "rm " & targetPosixPath
do shell script "rm " & fixedMessagePath
delete theMessage

set theProcessedItemsCounter to theProcessedItemsCounter + 1

on error
set theFaildItemsCounter to theFaildItemsCounter + 1
end try

end if
end repeat

-- give feedback
set theText to "Microsoft Entourage:" & return & return & theProcessedItemsCounter & " iPhone messages have been made readable" as text
if the theFaildItemsCounter > 0 then
set theText to theText & return & theFaildItemsCounter & " messages failed to process" as text
end if
display dialog theText buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"


end tell

The last posted script works great! The previous scripts would not work on all my messages, it looks as though they were looking for a specific start of message, and my iphone doesn't always have that start.

I am new to applescript...how do I get Ujwal Setlur's script above installed and working within Entourage? I was able to copy the script into a new script and save it to the ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items folder. Then I added a rule like in one of the above examples, but I get zero results when I run the rule.

Help, step by step instructions would be great. I have iPhone, not Blackberry.

Thanks!

The fix iphone sent mail script from Ujwal Setlur works perfect. Thanks a lot!!!

Thanks Guys!!