Deleting categories.

  • Thread starter Joseph Chamberlain, DDS
  • Start date
J

Joseph Chamberlain, DDS

Dear members:

I have decided to do some housekeeping and found several categories I had
created in Entourage that were not being used enough to justify their
maintenance.

I proceeded to delete those categories but then I thought occurred me that
perhaps my understanding of the process of deleting categories might not be
the right one. When I first deleted the categories I thought of them as
labels only. It was my impression that in deleting the categories I was
deleting the labels but the entries to which those categories were assigned
would remain undeleted (only now without any category assigned).

Is this right ? Or in deleting the categories I also deleted the entries
that had those categories assigned to them ? In case this is what I did, how
can this be reversed so that I don't loose important information I might
have mistakenly deleted ?

Thank you for your help.

Best regards,

Joseph
 
M

Michel Bintener

Hi Joseph,

deleting categories will *not* delete entries. Categories are, as you have
noticed, labels, and by deleting them, the individual Entourage items
assigned to that category will either be set to "None" (if they were only
assigned to the deleted category) or to other categories (if they were
assigned to two or more categories, including the deleted one).

On the other hand, in Apple's iCal, entries are assigned to a calendar, not
categories, and deleting calendars will result in the deletion of all the
items included in that calendar. (That doesn't really contribute to this
post, but I just thought I should include it for purposes of illustration.)

Michel
 
A

Art Kleiner

What can I do if I want to
1. Delete categories to clean up my category list, but
2. Still be able to search for my OLD emails by old categories?

In other words, I would like to have a shorter category list for new
projects, but every once in a while I'd like to go back and find an
email from aeons ago, and look for it by category?

Many thanks, ArtK
 
M

Michel Bintener

Well, I can't think of any way of doing that. As I've said, when you delete
a category, the items belonging to that category will revert to "None", or
to other categories assigned to them. There are two options I'd consider in
your case:

1) put all the older messages in folders, so that you can look inside these
folders if you want to read specific messages.

2) create a new category, called "Archive", or something along the lines,
and assign all the items belonging to the categories you'd like to get rid
of to the Archive category.

I'm sure other people might come up with different ideas, those are just two
methods I can think of right now. If one of these methods (or even both of
them) appeal to you and you don't know how to proceed, just post here, and
I'll help you out.

Michel

PS: Depending on how frequently you need to have access to these messages,
you might also want to export all the items belonging to these categories as
an archive (Entourage 2004 only). (File>Export)
 
J

Joseph Chamberlain, DDS

Michel:

Thank for your reply to my post and for answering my questions.

I feel a lot better knowing that I didn't mistakenly erase any important
information.

The iCal analogy was actually very helpful as it alerted me for possible
future mistakes that could lead to disastrous data erasure.

Thanks again,

Joseph
 
A

Art Kleiner

That is sort of the problem.

I get a LOT of email. Probably 400 a day.
And I'm usually working on about 40 projects at once. (I'm a magazine
editor).

In the ideal universe, I would have a folder for each, and that's how I
started out. But it was too time-consuming. And then I started getting
"out of memory" messages when I switched from Eudora to Entourage.

What I'd really like is a way to export my old emails from Entourage
into some easily searchable form. Like a Word file or something I could
google. Most of the time what I need, looking back, is the old email
address or name of somebody associated with a project.

Even being able to export from Entourage to Eudora would be good,
because then I could do my backlog searching in Eudora.

Is that feasible? What would you recommend?

Is the Archive easy to look through?

Thanks for this. I'd rather not spend hours experimenting with all
this, particulary in such a high-risk area as email.
 
M

Michel Bintener

In your case, archives are not the solution; you'd have to import them back
into Entourage every time you wanted to read an old message. The ideal
solution for you is probably the use of .mbox files. An .mbox file stores
your emails in one single text file, which can easily be opened and searched
by any text editor. Try the following: drag a folder from the email folder
list to the desktop. (Don't worry, nothing will happen to your folders,
they'll remain in Entourage until you delete them.) You should now have an
..mbox file on your desktop, which you can open with TextEdit. An other
advantage of using .mbox files is the fact that most email clients (on Mac
OS X, at least) should be able to import them. After exporting your folders
as .mbox files, you can delete them (the folders, that is) from Entourage,
and if you ever want to use these emails again, you can easily drag an .mbox
file back into the folder list.

This method has one disadvantage for you, though, as it requires you to
store all your messages in specific folders. Alternatively, you can also use
custom views, which you can drag to the desktop in the same way as you woud
with regular folders. If you need more help on sorting a massive amount of
emails, again, post back.
 
A

Art Kleiner

Gosh. That really sounds like the solution. I had no idea Entourage
could do that. I'll experiment. Thanks. ArtK
 
H

Heath

Hmm. I tried this, and all went well until the "open with text edit"
part. When double-clicked, the desktop mbox file keeps opening with
entourage and asking if I want to import the files into a new folder. I
said both no and yes at various times - when I said no, it just didn't
open; when I said yes, it just made a duplicate folder with the same
emails in my normal folder tree. When I control-clicked the desktop
version to change the "open with" it only offered me entourage or apple
mail. How can I get it to open with text edit?

(sorry to butt in!)

Heath
 
M

Michel Bintener

Hi Heath,
whenever you double-click a file in the Finder, it will be opened by the
application associated with that file type (right-clicking the file and
selecting Open With will show you a list of applications recommended for
that particular file type); that's why Entourage launches when you
double-click an .mbox file created by Entourage itself. The secret is *not*
to double-click the file; simply launch TextEdit, then, in that program, go
to File>Open, navigate to the desktop (or wherever you keep your .mbox
files), and you should be able to select and then open it. Alternatively, if
you happen to have TextEdit in your dock, simply drop the .mbox file on the
TextEdit icon, which will give you the same result.

Hope this helps
Michel
 
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