Among the security patches delivered with Microsoft's 11.4.0 update to Office 2004 this week, there was a fix for a subtle and deeply irritating bug that's been nipping at Exchange users for a long time. Under certain rare circumstances, Entourage users could unexpectedly and unexplainedly lose days or weeks worth of email, poof! I've personally seen this happen a handful of times over the past three years, and it's always a challenging conversation when the affected user asks "What the hell happened?" and the official reply is "Um... let me check the backups for you, mmmkay?"TUAW reader Vermyndax, who worked with Microsoft support to track down the bug, blogged about the cause and resolution of the issue today:
The bug occurs due to a bad logic assumption. Entourage 2004 treats its local database as authoritative to the mail stored in your mailbox. As such, if the Exchange server happens to be virus-scanning your mailbox when you synchronize your mail, Exchange will refuse to allow Entourage access to the items being scanned. Since Entourage receives no information on the existence of those items, it will mark them for deletion in its local database.
On the next sync, you lose all of those items in the mailbox too. In cases we noted, users were losing large swaths of email at once (on the order of 2-3 weeks' worth all at once).
Yech. While you could recover the mail from Outlook/OWA "Deleted Items," it was a pain -- and worse if you didn't notice the problem until after your retention deadline had passed. Upgrading to 11.4.0, assuming you aren't quite ready to make the leap to Office 2008, is sounding better all the time.
Thanks Vermyndax!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-13-2008 @ 7:36PM
rdkrauss said...
I had a couple questions about Office 2008 that I was hoping some reader might be able to answer.
First, I cannot figure out where AutoUpdate went? With Office 2004, I could run AutoUpdate to make sure all my office products were up to date. Is there a similar feature with Office 2008 that I just don't see?
Second, I'm having issues with Word staying in the Space I assigned it to. I like to keep it in Space 4, but it always opens in whatever space I'm in, and generally moves with me as I navigate through spaces.
Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated!
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2-14-2008 @ 9:11AM
han said...
If they could only fix the PowerPoint slideshow view crashing on Macbook bug, I'd be a happy camper.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6568508
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2-21-2008 @ 9:46AM
Tim said...
Good info Michael. Has anybody seen this happen to calendar entries only, and not email? How about if calendar entries are shared with editor access, and other peoples calendar entries get deleted?
Happened to me and I was able to recover with Recover Deleted Items, but just curious. Upgraded all Entourage clients to 11.4 and took away Editor rights, so hopefully this issue is resolved. Anybody else experience this?
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