Entourage, Tiger and Duplicate email

B

Budge

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If I have a user with a pop mail account and using Entourage 2004 and Tiger(10.4) they randomly get duplicate emails on either the Tiger Mac or their other Mac with the same version of Entourage and the same settings or on their PC with Outlook 2003 with the same settings. If they stop using the Tiger system and any otehr combination of computers to receeive email there is never a duplicate message. The combo of Entourage and Tiger seem to initate the problem. Has anyone seen this issue and do you have any indication of what might be wrong. The mail is coming from a POP mail account and not Exchange.
 
Mail never gives me a microsecond of trouble. Entourage is bad by even Microsoft standards. A quick search of this forum will reveal just about one new Entourage thread per day. Why use it?
 
MisterMe said:
Mail never gives me a microsecond of trouble. Entourage is bad by even Microsoft standards. A quick search of this forum will reveal just about one new Entourage thread per day. Why use it?
Click to expand...
I know you hate Entourage, so I'm only posting this so that there are two sides to the argument for or against it. I have never had any problems with Entourage, and like it quite a bit. In addition, the problems people have with it seem to be related to using it with Exchange servers (you pointed this out to me in a different post). I do not use it with Exchange, just POP, like the person who asked the initial question. :D

All that said, he seems to have a real problem, though I have never seen this before. I do check my POP email via a webmail interface, and I never have problems. It might not be Entourage, however. It could be something that Outlook is doing, but it's not affecting the Outlook machines. This post has my interest though.
 
I know it's three years after this thread got started, but it still comes up in the first page or two of Google searches for "Entourage duplicate email", so here's what little I've been able to figure out. There are multiple, not necessarily related causes for this problem:

- This problem happens with POP servers as well as Exchange servers, but sometimes for different reasons, requiring different fixes.

- Budge's experience above, implies that at least part of the time, Entourage might sometimes not properly maintain its internal database of which emails it’s already received (corroboration, at least for earlier versions of Microsoft email apps, is at http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/problems/bugs.htm#pop3uidl) (though unfortunately there isn’t an equivalent to the "Pop3uidl.dbx" file for Mac/Entourage users).

- When I first looked into this problem a couple years ago, I first thought Entourage might sometimes not notify the email server that it's received email, but I learned that’s not how mail servers operate—they don’t receive any such notification from email clients that access them, except to delete mail that the server has just sent (depending on your email app's setting for when to delete email), but I’ve located at least one report from an Entourage user who found that even turning on the option to delete mail from the server as soon as Entourage downloads it, didn’t help (implying for that user, email really wasn’t being deleted from the server), so this again implies the problem is often (usually?) Entourage (and sometimes other email apps too) not properly maintaining its own database as to what emails it’s received.

- Some people have at least temporarily fixed the problem by deleting their Entourage email account, and re-creating it. But since a simple deletion of your Entourage account/identity will lose your email, I suspect a better solution would be to export your identity's data, create a new identity, then import that data, since I don't think the bug is in any of Entourage's prefs files, but instead in the identity's "Database" file.

- I tried to determine whether the problem is in a specific prefs file associated with Entourage that can be trashed and re-created, without disturbing Entourage's Database file, but I have my doubts whether it’s in any of the simpler prefs files (~/Library/Preferences/ com.microsoft.Entourage.plist, or ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/ Entourage Preferences, etc.), since I don’t see them changing their modification date when you send or receive email. That's why I think Entourage may track downloaded email in its catch-all “Database” file at ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/Main Identity (or whatever your account is named), which would be a pain since I can’t see a way to repair it of this problem (using Entourage's rebuild option doesn’t fix the problem, though it may sometimes remove duplicate emails in your inbox, until the problem happens again; and, manually editing the Database file with a file editor will probably screw it up), except maybe by exporting its data, as I describe above, and importing that data into a new identity. There may be some message tracking done by the cache of message pointers Entourage maintains at ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage/2004/Main Identity/Messages, but deleting any of the pointer files in the folders inside this folder, doesn’t cause Entourage to re-download any of the associated messages when you tell it to receive messages. It’s not in the file named “index” in the Messages folder at that path.

The alternative is to use a different email app. I use Apple's Mail, but I work with clients who use Entourage, and are seeing this problem still, with OS 10.4.11, and the latest Office 2004, version 11.4.1, so it seems Microsoft doesn't think we're good enough to have this fixed.
 
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Sweet Jesus! THREE YEARS of people posing this question with no solution?

Is there no easy fix for this - a script, third-party program, or whatever? I have duplicate, triplicate and even quadruplicate copies in my entourage 2008, running MAC OS X 10.5.4 on a new MacBook Pro.

Can anyone help? Thank you!
 
I have the latest version of Entourage together with Leopard and it is worse than ever.

I might go for a few days without any duplicates, and then for no reason I get the whole of my email servers directory downloaded up to SIX times, and then it goes back to normal use for a few days and then I receive a few duplicated emails.

There doesn't appear to be any cause which can be traced in order to solve the problem, it just happens randomly.

I've tried recreating the account several times, but with no effect



John Sawyer said:
I know it's three years after this thread got started, but it still comes up in the first page or two of Google searches for "Entourage duplicate email", so here's what little I've been able to figure out. There are multiple, not necessarily related causes for this problem:

- This problem happens with POP servers as well as Exchange servers, but sometimes for different reasons, requiring different fixes.

- Budge's experience above, implies that at least part of the time, Entourage might sometimes not properly maintain its internal database of which emails it’s already received (corroboration, at least for earlier versions of Microsoft email apps, is at http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/problems/bugs.htm#pop3uidl) (though unfortunately there isn’t an equivalent to the "Pop3uidl.dbx" file for Mac/Entourage users).

- When I first looked into this problem a couple years ago, I first thought Entourage might sometimes not notify the email server that it's received email, but I learned that’s not how mail servers operate—they don’t receive any such notification from email clients that access them, except to delete mail that the server has just sent (depending on your email app's setting for when to delete email), but I’ve located at least one report from an Entourage user who found that even turning on the option to delete mail from the server as soon as Entourage downloads it, didn’t help (implying for that user, email really wasn’t being deleted from the server), so this again implies the problem is often (usually?) Entourage (and sometimes other email apps too) not properly maintaining its own database as to what emails it’s received.

- Some people have at least temporarily fixed the problem by deleting their Entourage email account, and re-creating it. But since a simple deletion of your Entourage account/identity will lose your email, I suspect a better solution would be to export your identity's data, create a new identity, then import that data, since I don't think the bug is in any of Entourage's prefs files, but instead in the identity's "Database" file.

- I tried to determine whether the problem is in a specific prefs file associated with Entourage that can be trashed and re-created, without disturbing Entourage's Database file, but I have my doubts whether it’s in any of the simpler prefs files (~/Library/Preferences/ com.microsoft.Entourage.plist, or ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/ Entourage Preferences, etc.), since I don’t see them changing their modification date when you send or receive email. That's why I think Entourage may track downloaded email in its catch-all “Database” file at ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/Main Identity (or whatever your account is named), which would be a pain since I can’t see a way to repair it of this problem (using Entourage's rebuild option doesn’t fix the problem, though it may sometimes remove duplicate emails in your inbox, until the problem happens again; and, manually editing the Database file with a file editor will probably screw it up), except maybe by exporting its data, as I describe above, and importing that data into a new identity. There may be some message tracking done by the cache of message pointers Entourage maintains at ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage/2004/Main Identity/Messages, but deleting any of the pointer files in the folders inside this folder, doesn’t cause Entourage to re-download any of the associated messages when you tell it to receive messages. It’s not in the file named “index” in the Messages folder at that path.

The alternative is to use a different email app. I use Apple's Mail, but I work with clients who use Entourage, and are seeing this problem still, with OS 10.4.11, and the latest Office 2004, version 11.4.1, so it seems Microsoft doesn't think we're good enough to have this fixed.
Click to expand...
 
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