Ditching Microsoft Entourage

Today I had the unpleasant experience of Microsoft Entourage quitting unexpectedly and then failing to relaunch because its database was corrupt. Database, what gives? Why does a desktop mail application need a database? It turns out Microsoft thought it was a good idea to store your entire account - emails, appointments, calendars, etc. - in a single file. It turns out this is a terrible idea. One application crash single handedly rendered the entire Entourage application unusable. To make matters worse, the corrupt database file is holding my data hostage.

Microsoft ships a database repair utility to address this very situation. Unfortunately, the utility stinks. It spent 3 hours verifying the database, decided the file was corrupt and is now in the 5th hour of attempting to recover my data. Even though I only have a gig or two of email, a quick file check reveals the database file is taking up a whopping 18 GB of disk space!

Why not simply grab the latest backup from Time Machine and just restore it? Well, to get a consistent backup of a database, the database file would have to be closed, which it never is. Even if Entourage is closed, the Microsoft Database Service is always running in the background keeping the file open. Simply put the file's consistency can never be guaranteed, so a backup is useless. Thank you Microsoft.

The Entourage "Database" is a complete disaster and needs to be gotten rid of in the next release of the Mac Office product. Most mail applications and mail servers store emails in directories of individual files. Backup and restoring such an arrangement is quite straight forward.

The problem I had today is unacceptable, as is the abysmal support Entourage offers for working with an Exchange server, but we'll save that for another post.

For now, I'm off to find a solid replacement for Entourage.