Archive Entourage email?
We ran into an issue with a user who’s Exchange mailbox had grown to a size that was very large, too large in fact. We needed to find a way to shrink it and usually this means to archive a significant portion of the messages. But as we were about to find out, this wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought.
Outlook users have many options when it comes to managing email archives and even ExMerge can run fairly selective archive routines, but this person was an Entourage user. Those other programs all have one thing in common, they output in PST, of which Entourage cannot handle natively. Yes there were other options, I could export to PST and then import to Thunderbird and then export to mbox format and then import to Entourage. What I would have been left with is a heap of ugly plain text email that wasn’t easily searchable nor sortable. I could also try and just move everything manually using click/drag but the folder structure was too complex and there was just too much mail.
What I really needed for this user was a way to have their somewhat complex email structure replicated in their local Entourage folders. Then we could move messages that were older than say, 6 months, into those corresponding locations. After a short and frustrating effort to do this manually, I spent some more time looking for a script that could possibly automate the action. I didn’t find a script but what I did end up finding was a program called the Entourage Exchange Accounts Optimizer. I know, the name could use some work but the program is brilliant.
For just $15 It does exactly what I needed it to do. Replicates the Exchange folder structure onto the local machine, moves the email that is older than the date specified, and is able to be scheduled to run daily. Why MS decided to leave this out, I can only guess but this program is certainly the bee’s knees.