How To Archive Entourage 2008 Mail using Multiple Identities
The measly 350MB mailbox quota allotted by my corporate IT department has me being creative with the storage of my email. Many of the other information workers I know suffer the same plight. If you are a Microsoft Entourage (the Mac OS X cousin to Microsoft Outlook) like me and like to avoid paying for tools (like EEAX or MailSteward), I hope this how-to helps assuage your mail storage, archival and backup woes. In my opinion, how to Archive Your Data by Microsoft Entourage Help and other articles like “In Entourage, how do I archive my mail?” do a mediocre job of informing us about the caveats involved in archiving mail. The two native export options I’ll speak of are:
- archive Entourage mail using mbox files
- an mbox file contains a set of mail messages that you can import back into Entourage or into some other mail applications.
- archive Entourage mail using .rge archives
- an Entourage archive file (.rge) can contain email messages, contacts, events, notes, tasks, and project files.
- .rge files have high compression ratios, which saves on your disk space.
I promulgate using the latter of these options to archive your Entourage mail is the solution of choice and here’s how I suggest doing so:
Suggested Solution
To clean up your mailbox in a comprehensive Time Machine and Spotlight-friendly way, use a combination of Mail Views (Saved Searches), a .rge archive and multiple identities. To ready your mail for archiving, you’ll first want to organize mail for export. Entourage will export data, but in a limited number of ways. One way to do this is by creating and assigning a category to your mail. Like others before me, I’ve chosen to archive my mail on an annual basis (I don’t know why, since I reach my mail quota well ahead of reaching the end of the year – I may need to archive every 6 months).
1. Use Categories to Organize Email for Export
I suggest creating two custom Mail Views (last group in the folders pane, below Microsoft News Server) one for Received Mail and for Sent Mail.
- To create a mail view for Received Mail, select the folder you want to search in (probably your Inbox), then go to to Edit > Advanced Search (⌥⌘ F)
- Set the option to “Match if any criteria are met”
- From the dropdown, set “Date Received”
- From the next dropdown, set “Greater Than” and then enter the preferred email age. This will find all email older than the specified number of days in the date received field. In the example screenshot, I was 151 days into the 365 day year when creating this archive.
- Entourage will find all the matching mail. Scroll through and make sure all the mail you want is in the view and from all the folders you wish to archive. Save the search.
- Repeat steps 1-5 for your Sent Items using the parameters **“Date Sent”, “Greater Than”,
”**.
2. Create an “Archive” Category
Once you’ve verified these two mail views to filter out the mail you wish to archive, create a new category to put them in.
- Go to Edit > Categories > Edit Categories and edit your categories to make an “Archive” category
- Right-click on your Mail Views, then assign your new category “Archive” to those items.
3. Export Mail to .rge Archive
- Go to File > Export
- Select the option to export “Items that are in a category”.
- Choose your custom “Archive” category. Then select the item types, mail, tasks, etc., that you want to archive
</td> |
</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> 4. Create Another IdentityIf you want quick access to your archived mail, I suggest creating a new Identity that will allow you to quickly “Switch Identities” to view old mail.
|