Archiving your Entourage mail is a chore that varies in ease and effectiveness, depending on how much time and tweaking energy you're willing to put into it. You can drag messages to Finder folders to export them, or pull out entire folders as MBOX files; you can also export folder sets to Entourage's For an easy, one-step archiving option in Entourage, your best bet is Entourage Email Archiver X (EEAX), just updated to version 4 -- now Leopard and Entourage 2008-only, with v3.6.1 still available for Tiger/2004 users. Along with the companion Entourage Email Optimizer product that Scott mentioned last week, EEAX can streamline your archiving to six different target formats. You get Spotlight-searchable archives, a FileMaker template for database storage, and .eml native-format messages in case you need to bring things back to the mothership. A single-user license of EEAX is $30, and upgrades to v4 for existing users are $10.
If you've got scores, hundreds or thousands of mail accounts to archive, or you're converting from one mail format to another (say, from Outlook Express to Entourage), that's a job for an industrial-strength email exporting and conversion tool. You might want to check out Emailchemy, which has a pretty good track record; it's the only tool I know that can go directly from Outlook 2003 PST files to Entourage RGE archives. The latest version supports Entourage 2008 and includes a Google Apps migration tool as well. Emailchemy is $28 for a single-user license.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-04-2008 @ 10:53AM
Shahid said...
Once you have imported your thousands of archives into Entourage using this program, can you keep all of this in sync between two Macs by using .Mac sync services? (Does Entourage support mail syncing through .Mac?)
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3-04-2008 @ 11:00AM
Andy said...
Entourage supports synchronization through .Mac. For Mail, just use an IMAP account.
3-04-2008 @ 11:13AM
Michael Rose said...
Shahid, if you're asking about EEAX, it's the other way around -- you're exporting FROM Entourage, not importing to it.
3-04-2008 @ 10:59AM
Andy said...
BTW, I'm not sure I'd call the Entourage RGE format proprietary, it's a document bundle with each item in the archive stored in the respective Internet standard file format:
- E-mail messages in MBOX
- Contacts in vCard
- Events, tasks, and notes in iCalendar
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3-04-2008 @ 11:17AM
Michael Rose said...
Andy, first of all, thanks for taking the time to comment -- it's appreciated.
I've amended the post; "idiosyncratic" rather than "proprietary" for RGE, since the internal formats are open and documented but the RGE bundle is handled mostly by Entourage and Emailchemy.
3-04-2008 @ 11:23AM
Howie Isaacks said...
This is great. I'm glad that there are good tools now for archiving email in Entourage. A lot of my business clients want to have the ability to archive the same way that they did in Outlook.
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