Can't remove broken rule

[Robin]

I've recently developed a problem with rules.
Background; I have my junk mail filter set to high. I had one rule,
it was set up to take emails from a specific sender & reroute it to a
folder. It said "from contains (the name of the sender)" "move
message (the name of the folder)".

This rule worked for months with no problem, then I noticed it wasn't
working anymore & emails from that sender were being labelled junk
mail & being deleted. I figured out that this was because the sender
had suddenly changed the name that they were sending me these emails
from.

So, I selected the new name in the preview pane & selected "create new
rule" then created the same settings as the previous rule. The next
time I checked my mail, that rule was applied to every piece of mail I
received. I tried disabling the rule, it was still applied. I
deleted the rule, it still applied. I deleted all rules & turned off
the junk mail filter. I rebooted. I upgraded. I rebooted again. I
now have no rules & each time I check my mail Entourage tries to apply
this now non-existent rule & displays an error message.

HELP!

 

[Barry Wainwright]

It sounds like you need to do a database rebuild - maybe an advanced one!

Hold down the option key when starting Entourage until you see the rebuild
screen. Then, follow the instructions.

 

[Robin]

Well, I tried rebuilding the database. First a basic rebuild, then an
advanced one. I deleted the old databases & even a document I found
called 'rules'. Didn't work. Still getting the error message.

Any other ideas anyone?

 

[Barry Wainwright]

Well, I tried rebuilding the database. First a basic rebuild, then an
advanced one. I deleted the old databases & even a document I found
called 'rules'. Didn't work. Still getting the error message.

Any other ideas anyone?

In that case, I doubt that it's a rule that's doing it.

Please describe your symptoms again, giving repro steps if possible.

 

[Robin]

In that case, I doubt that it's a rule that's doing it.

Please describe your symptoms again, giving repro steps if possible.

Well, everytime I get new mail, Entourage tries to apply this rule
that doesn't exist anymore. The rule it's trying to apply I created
by selecting the deleted item, clicking on the "this is not junk mail"
link. Telling Entourage to create a new rule from it. Then telling
it how I wanted it to treat all emails from that sender.

The problem here is that Entrouage thinks all emails fit the criteria
& nothing I've done so far has been able to stop that.

 

[Diane Ross]

Well, everytime I get new mail, Entourage tries to apply this rule
that doesn't exist anymore. The rule it's trying to apply I created
by selecting the deleted item, clicking on the "this is not junk mail"
link. Telling Entourage to create a new rule from it. Then telling
it how I wanted it to treat all emails from that sender.

The problem here is that Entrouage thinks all emails fit the criteria
& nothing I've done so far has been able to stop that.

Please send a screen shot of your rule and your rule list to me off list.
I'm confused about your criteria and your rules.

Can you uncheck the rule?

Trying to eliminate junk mail by adding individual addresses as criterion to
a rule isn¹t particularly effective unless it is a consistent problem with
one address. Spammers often use random addresses to send spam ­ many of
which don¹t actually exist. So they have a literally infinite amount of
addresses they can use, which is why they¹ll rarely use the same one twice.

For more info on how to deal with Spam visit:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/rules/rules_junk.html>

 

[Robin]

As I said in my initial post, I removed all rules, so there aren't any
to show you. Also, it wasn't spam that I was trying to deal with, it
was a subscription newsletter that I was trying to file. I didn't
include that detail because it wasn't relevant and I wanted to keep it
simple.

Bottom line, the new rule I created treated every piece of mail the
same way, so I deleted it. Unfortunately, deleting it didn't work, it
still keeps running on every piece of mail.

That's my problem, the rule didn't work & now I can't get rid of it.
Just like the title of my post says.

The only solution I've been able to come up with is to uninstall
Entourage & reinstall it, but I don't want to lose any data so I'm
looking for an alternate solution.

 

[Diane Ross]

As I said in my initial post, I removed all rules, so there aren't any
to show you. Also, it wasn't spam that I was trying to deal with, it
was a subscription newsletter that I was trying to file. I didn't
include that detail because it wasn't relevant and I wanted to keep it
simple.

Sometimes folks come in at an end of a thread and don't have time to go back
and research what might have been said at the beginning.

Bottom line, the new rule I created treated every piece of mail the
same way, so I deleted it. Unfortunately, deleting it didn't work, it
still keeps running on every piece of mail.

That's my problem, the rule didn't work & now I can't get rid of it.
Just like the title of my post says.

If a rule is still running after it's been deleted, that indicates
corruption and a rebuild should fix it.

The only solution I've been able to come up with is to uninstall
Entourage & reinstall it, but I don't want to lose any data so I'm
looking for an alternate solution.

Reinstalling Entourage does not touch your data, and if your data is corrupt
then reinstalling won't help.

You can eliminate Entourage install as part of the problem by creating a new
User. This will eliminate corruption or conflicts in your database:

* In System Preferences: Users: Create a new user.
* Log Out/In to new user. Open Entourage and see if the problems go away.
(You might need to recreate your account info.)

If problems disappear then you know it's a conflict or corruption in your
database.

 

[David Blaymires]

As I said in my initial post, I removed all rules, so there aren't any
to show you. Also, it wasn't spam that I was trying to deal with, it
was a subscription newsletter that I was trying to file. I didn't
include that detail because it wasn't relevant and I wanted to keep it
simple.

Bottom line, the new rule I created treated every piece of mail the
same way, so I deleted it. Unfortunately, deleting it didn't work, it
still keeps running on every piece of mail.

That's my problem, the rule didn't work & now I can't get rid of it.
Just like the title of my post says.

The only solution I've been able to come up with is to uninstall
Entourage & reinstall it, but I don't want to lose any data so I'm
looking for an alternate solution.

I have something similar, in that I have messages delivered to a folder that
they should not be delivered to. There's one rule that is set up to deliver
the messages to that folder that is only for one email address (so the rule
is ADDRESS IS .....). However, somehow a whole pile of other mail gets
delivered to that folder as well, and there are no rules (POP, IMAP, or
other) that reference that folder.

The only other thing that I was wondering is the rules that are on the
Exchange Server, and whether they are getting confused about folders that
are "In My Computer" and folders that are on the Exchange Server in the IMAP
account. I can't help thinking that there is a bug somewhere, as there
seems to be some flakiness in the way that Entourage behaves - I still
periodically get the dreaded beach ball, and have to force quit and rebuild
the database twice to get things working again...

 

[Diane Ross]

The only other thing that I was wondering is the rules that are on the
Exchange Server, and whether they are getting confused about folders that
are "In My Computer" and folders that are on the Exchange Server in the IMAP
account. I can't help thinking that there is a bug somewhere, as there
seems to be some flakiness in the way that Entourage behaves - I still
periodically get the dreaded beach ball, and have to force quit and rebuild
the database twice to get things working again...

Have you checked out the Exchange Support page guides and FAQs? The beach
ball sounds like Entourage might be trying to sync.

Using Exchange Server with Entourage
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/exchange_server.html#anchor-exup9>

You might want to either:

1. Let Entourage run overnight and finish the initial sync of all
your data.
2. Turn off the "automatically sync all folders" option in the
account dialog, especially if your company has a lot of mail in public
folders.

 

[Robin]

If a rule is still running after it's been deleted, that indicates

corruption and a rebuild should fix it.

It didn't.

Reinstalling Entourage does not touch your data, and if your data is corrupt
then reinstalling won't help.

I was hoping that upgrading would fix what is obviously a bug in the
software. That of course did not work either.

You can eliminate Entourage install as part of the problem by creating a new
User. This will eliminate corruption or conflicts in your database:

* In System Preferences: Users: Create a new user.
* Log Out/In to new user. Open Entourage and see if the problems go away.
(You might need to recreate your account info.)

If problems disappear then you know it's a conflict or corruption in your
database.

Okay, so say I create a new user, then how do I move my address book
over to that new user? I have way too many contacts to even think
about not doing that. Then there's the saved emails that were the
cause of this whole mess. Ugh!

 

[David Blaymires]

Have you checked out the Exchange Support page guides and FAQs? The beach
ball sounds like Entourage might be trying to sync.

Using Exchange Server with Entourage
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/exchange_server.html#anchor-exup9>

You might want to either:

1. Let Entourage run overnight and finish the initial sync of all
your data.
2. Turn off the "automatically sync all folders" option in the
account dialog, especially if your company has a lot of mail in public
folders.

Hi Diane,

Synching is not the problem, I have it all synched - calendar, contacts,
mail. Even when I quit out of Entourage, and it tells me that "synch
operations are in progress , do you want to wait for them to finish", that
completes quite quickly.

The problem is that Entourage stops responding. When the dreaded beach ball
starts and persists, if you click on the Entourage icon in the Dock and hold
it down, you get a pop-up menu. It has an item that tells me that the
application is not responding, and Force Quit is therefore one of the
options in the menu. If the application is still responding, the menu
options are quite different, and QUIT (as opposed to Force Quit) is one of
the options. So OS X knows what Entourage is doing.

There is something wrong, as the rules are not processed correctly, and I
have to rebuild the database every few days after the beach ball does its
thing... I have checked my disk and repaired permissions so I'm as
confident as one can be that everything on my hard drive is working OK. And
I'm running Mac OS X 10.2.6.

I strongly believe that the rules on the Exchange Server are incompatible
with the folder structure in Entourage, when you have multiple subfolders in
your "In My Computer" area. I get messages that are sent via the exchange
server that are delivered to a sub-folder of the Inbox in the In My Computer
folder. How I don't know... There is no rule that processes to these
folders.

I used to have public holidays in my calendar, but I ditched those after
ending up with over 24,000 of them, and having to delete the duplicates so
many times that I lost count. It only settled down when I deleted ALL
public holidays - but this is an Entourage feature that should work, right?

I have deleted the Exchange account, rebuilt the database twice, then
created a new Exchange account, and had the whole thing synchronise in only
5 minutes (after deleting all holidays). Everything works fine for a
while, and then the beach ball appears. Entourage has crashed, and I have
to force quit. Rebuild the database twice and start all over again,
synchronising all folders and subfolders, and off we go.

You want to know something even more frustrating - Microsoft here in
Australia don't even want to know about it - they don't have anyone over
here outside of a small marketing team that even knows about the Mac.

My frustration is that it is impossible to COMMUNICATE with ANYONE at
Microsoft about these problems and have them ACKNOWLEDGE the fact I have a
problem and get some feedback. Forget about getting some help (outside of
what the MVPs try hard to do).

I try to be a good user (after all, I run a software development company)
and I report bugs on the website, and ideas, and the things that are
important to me. Hell, the product we develop even integrates with all the
Microsoft mail clients on both Mac and Windows, and we recommend their
server platforms when our clients need to run cross platform. We use their
stuff extensively in-house.

We perceive that Microsoft doesn't care because they don't communicate - and
perception is reality (for a customer). If only they would start
communicating, and help us fix things. All this would be a lot better...

 

[Diane Ross]

Okay, so say I create a new user, then how do I move my address book
over to that new user? I have way too many contacts to even think
about not doing that. Then there's the saved emails that were the
cause of this whole mess. Ugh!

Just create the one rule and add the one sender to test. The idea is to test
for the problem.

 

[Diane Ross]

We perceive that Microsoft doesn't care because they don't communicate - and
perception is reality (for a customer). If only they would start
communicating, and help us fix things. All this would be a lot better...

FWIW, MS developers are answering questions on this list.

I don't have exchange and it's hard to help with answers to something you
only read about. Most MVPs are in the same boat.

 

[Dave Cortright]

FWIW, MS developers are answering questions on this list.

I don't have exchange and it's hard to help with answers to something you
only read about. Most MVPs are in the same boat.

The biggest problem with Exchange server problems is that every one is set
up differently. Hence the reason the MVP FAQ is so long. I can tell you for
sure that Exchange-based rules shouldn't matter at all. Entourage does not
attempt to sync server side rules with it's own rules.

One thing you could try is Work Offline before you quit. Does that help?
More drastic, you could try deleting your Exchange account and see if that
helps. Or try creating the Exchange account in another identity. Do you see
the same hang there?