Apple's Mountain Lion Ate My 2004 Entourage Emails

[Ataraxia]

No access and I don't want to buy more software to access them.

I hope there wasn't anything important in there...

Just a warning, I guess.

[mahler10th]

No access and I don't want to buy more software to access them.
I hope there wasn't anything important in there...
Just a warning, I guess.

Er...what are you on about???

[Ataraxia]

Do you use Entourage 2004 for Mac?

[mahler10th]

Do you use Entourage 2004 for Mac?

No.  That is why I have exhibited stupidity.     Bad luck dave.  I hope you didn't have any workable drafts and ideas stored in Entourage.  That would be a real downer.

[Ataraxia]

Thank you.

I think it stores the attachments separately so I might be okay in that respect.

But all my contacts are gone. In some cases maybe that's not such a bad thing.

[petrarch]

You can probably install a trial version of a more recent version of Office and import the emails. Then you should be able to import them into Mail if that is the way you want to go.

[Ataraxia]

You can probably install a trial version of a more recent version of Office and import the emails. Then you should be able to import them into Mail if that is the way you want to go.

Now there's an idea. Thanks!

[Ataraxia]

That didn't work. 2011 Outlook doesn't want to convert 2004 Entourage mail.

[Kontrapunctus]

My Outlook 2011 for Mac just crashed so badly that I had to delete it--I lost all sorts of saved mail. Now, I can't reinstall just that program--it won't run and I get a massively long error message instead. Apple's Mail is good enough, I guess.

[Ataraxia]

My Outlook 2011 for Mac just crashed so badly that I had to delete it--I lost all sorts of saved mail. Now, I can't reinstall just that program--it won't run and I get a massively long error message instead. Apple's Mail is good enough, I guess.

Sorry about that.

Yes, I too am using Apple's mail and hoping I didn't lose anything I can't recover some other way. My docs and spreadsheets are fine because I discovered OpenOffice which is free.

[petrarch]

That didn't work. 2011 Outlook doesn't want to convert 2004 Entourage mail.

That's too bad. I am not a user of Entourage or Outlook on OS X, so can't really give you a proper solution, but I see that this is not an uncommon problem (it's a legacy PowerPC app, and OS X has had the compatibility layer removed from Lion onwards) so perhaps if you google it you will find a solution that fits your circumstances.

[petrarch]

My Outlook 2011 for Mac just crashed so badly that I had to delete it--I lost all sorts of saved mail. Now, I can't reinstall just that program--it won't run and I get a massively long error message instead. Apple's Mail is good enough, I guess.

That's really bad luck. I've had the same happen to me both at home and at work in the past decade. I got so fed up with it that I moved all my home email to gmail and started doing daily backups of the pst files (the huge files Outlook creates with all emails) for all my work email (I have since moved to Mac at home but for work I still need a Windows machine and the company is bound to Outlook).

One thing you may want to try is to recover the pst files that contain all your emails. I was able to recover about 650 MB of about 700 MB I had in emails when it happened to me. There are utilities out there to do this, although I am not sure if they are Windows-only. Another thing I started doing was dividing the email among several files, about 200 MB each, which also helps mitigate file corruption and performance issues.

[Gurn Blanston]

I never thought I would be advocating anything 'cloud-y' in any way, but since I started using Gmail in 2006, I haven't lost a single piece of mail, despite some major crashes in that time frame. Just sayin'.... 

[petrarch]

I never thought I would be advocating anything 'cloud-y' in any way, but since I started using Gmail in 2006, I haven't lost a single piece of mail, despite some major crashes in that time frame. Just sayin'.... 

+1 . And searching over a decade's worth of emails has never been easier nor faster. Try that with Outlook ...

[Kontrapunctus]

I really hate the way Gmail bots (I assume it isn't a person...) read my messages and post ads that I might find appealing. Not likely.

[Gurn Blanston]

I really hate the way Gmail bots (I assume it isn't a person...) read my messages and post ads that I might find appealing. Not likely.

I haven't even noticed one of those ads in 5 years. No big deal. Certainly not to where it overbalances the upside.

[Kontrapunctus]

^ Be that as it may, I used Time Machine to restore Outlook, then I had to rebuild the identity. The program works now, but I lost all of my saved mail and contacts. Sigh.