You are talking about news messages, I guess?
Because News is a server based service, the number of messages is determined
by the service provider. Entourage does keep a local cache of messages
downloaded from the server, and these can be cleared (for all newsgroups of
that news account) by right-clicking the news server icon in the folder
listing and selecting 'empty cache'. However, at the next connection
messages will be re-downloaded up to the limit set in the news account
settings (open 'accounts' under the tools menu, select the 'News' tab,
double-0click on the news account and under the 'options' tab there is a
place to select how many headers to download).
And if you don't have a rule to download entire messages in pace, only the
headers download again. You can "find your place" and mark the older
messages as "read" so they don't download again. In any case, if you've
never emptied the cache before, you may well have emptied up to 10,000 old
complete messages and get just 300 (or fewer, like 50, if you've changed
the number in Accounts/News/Options) headers only, _per newsgroup_. If you
read 10 newsgroups that could mean you've cleared up to about 1,000,000 K
worth of messages and re-downloaded maybe 3,000 K or less worth of headers.
Quite a savings.
Note that news servers will have automatic routines to delete older
messages, and when they are deleted from the server Entourage will also
delete them from the local cache, so your news cache will ultimately reach
an optimum size and stay close to that.
Now that's something that never occurred to me. I just learned something,
Barry. Are you sure that Entourage deletes cleared messages from the cache?
Interesting - so if you want to keep them forever you'd have to make copies
in a local folder. I've never tested this. I think these Microsoft news
servers are cleared about every 6 months or so? Maybe more frequently? I
tend to empty the cache or have to do a database rebuild a little more
frequently than that (though not much) and I've never checked to see how old
my oldest news messages are in the cache before doing so. How old are your
oldest messages here?
--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <
http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>
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