Entourage 2004 Junk filter stopped working

A

amcjames

The built-in junk filter for Entourage 2004 was working very well for
me for several weeks, catching almost every piece of spam and sending
it to the Junk E-Mail folder. However, about a week ago it stopped
catching the spam, and nothing I do seems to restore full
functionality.

Low and High settings have virtually no effect, and even when set to
Exclusive, it only catches about 1 in 10 junk emails, and some of
those don't actually get sent to Junk E-Mail folder. To make matters
even more confusing, when it the filter is turned off, Entourage still
occasionally flags an email as junk. I have tried to rebuild the
database, deleted all rules, removed several little-used accounts, and
finally did a complete removal and reinstall of Office.

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.
 
B

Barry Wainwright

Have you renamed the 'Junk' category? This is a reserved category and should
not be used for anything else.

If you run this little script,it will tell you which category Entourage
thinks is 'junk':

Tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
Set theName to name of category id 1
Display dialog "Name of the 'Junk' category is: \"" & thename & "\"" buttons
{"OK"} default button 1
End tell
 
A

amcjames

Thanks for the script, but it confirms that the Junk category is still
the default. I did not make any changes that I know of at the time the
filter stopped working. I'm also perplexed as to why images are now
downloading automatically, whereas previously I always had to click
the download pictures option. Seems like a bad preference file or
something, but I purged all the preference files when I did the remove
and reinstall.
 
C

Christine Evans

Hi,

I had exactly the same problem -- it just started last week. I had the
filter set on high and it worked well and now NOTHING is going to junk mail!
Very odd!

Any other suggestions?
Chris
 
A

amcjames

Hello Christine,

In my case, I was able to track the source of the problem to an
Entourage preference file that the Remove Office Tool did not take
care of, and I overlooked in my manual cleanup. In my user account
Library:preferences:Microsoft folder, there are several Entourage
preference files. Deleting this folder fixed the problem - I‘m not
certain exactly which file was the culprit
(com.microsoft.Entourage.prefs.plist or Entourage Preferences?), and I
did not get around to testing to determine it. It was not a big deal
to reset my preferences. If that does not work, I'd suggest doing a
serach for any file with Entourage in the name, and deleting anything
that is a preference file (after quitting). The program will recreate
them the next time you launch it.

I hope this solution works for you, as well. Good luck.

James
 
S

sesweitzer

Me too - everything was working fine and then all of a sudden the junk
mail filter quit working. I even went in and erased all the "safe
domains", tried different settings (I had it set to only allow messages
from people in my address book.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

steve
 
Top