Entourage database and Time Machine

Time Machine and the Entourage database don’t play well together.  The problem most people have is that their Entourage profile is a massive, monolithic database and even opening Entourage causes Time Machine to back up the entire database not just the changes.  Normally the advice is to manually copy the user profile every once and a while and not let Time Machine back it up unless you have an infinite amount of disk space.

You can also have problems because even if all your Office apps are closed the database daemon is still running and this can lead to corrupt database backups.  Before you backup the Office database you can run this command:

tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to quit

And after you are done you can do restart or run this command:

tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to launch

Accents in display names causing problems in Entourage

We have seen problems in Entourage where an e-mail will arrive and have the sender's name split in two parts. One part will contain the valid e-mail address and the other will simply have a question mark before it. Attempting to reply to messages like this results in the message bouncing with a failure notice similar to "invalid e-mail address."

We have found that users who have accents in their display names cause this problem. Removing the accent in the user's AD display name resolves the issue.

This is only a problem in Entourage 2008- Entourage Web Services Edition and Outlook do not display this behavior.

Garbled Text in Entourage

Problem: Entourage displays garbled text in all fields- header, folder names and message body.

Fix: Go to /Users/[user name]/Library/Caches and delete the com.microsoft.browserfont.cache file.

Relaunch Entourage and the text should be back to normal.