OS X Tiger's Spotlight and Entourage

  • Thread starter Michael Jardine
  • Start date
M

Michael Jardine

Does anyone have any idea when Entourage will be upgraded so that it works
with Spotlight?

Thanks....
 
M

matt neuburg

Michael Jardine said:
Does anyone have any idea when Entourage will be upgraded so that it works
with Spotlight?
Click to expand...

Probably some people do, but those people are insiders so they are
unlikely to tell you and me. Boy, I'd hate to be driving across the
country with you in the car. "Are we there yet?" Obviously not. m.
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

matt neuburg said:
Probably some people do, but those people are insiders so they are
unlikely to tell you and me. Boy, I'd hate to be driving across the
country with you in the car. "Are we there yet?" Obviously not. m.
Click to expand...

More than that. I wonder how they'll do it.
Spotlight needs to have a file descriptor it can use to "understand" the
files and then indexes the first xxx bytes of ech file it finds.
Entourage uses a monolithic database where all e-mails are stored. I
fear the MacBU would have to find some trick to allow Spotlight to read
each e-mail in the database as if they were individual files then. Not
trivial...

Corentin
 
D

Daiya Mitchell

More than that. I wonder how they'll do it.
Spotlight needs to have a file descriptor it can use to "understand" the
files and then indexes the first xxx bytes of ech file it finds.
Entourage uses a monolithic database where all e-mails are stored. I
fear the MacBU would have to find some trick to allow Spotlight to read
each e-mail in the database as if they were individual files then. Not
trivial...
Click to expand...
I read somewhere that Mail had to completely switch from a database format
to a "store each message individually" format to let Spotlight work--so not
only not trivial, an approach Apple decided either wouldn't work or was too
much trouble, and re-coded Mail instead....

I'm thinking it won't be an update that enables this.....
 
R

Rob Buckley

I read somewhere that Mail had to completely switch from a database format
to a "store each message individually" format to let Spotlight work--so not
only not trivial, an approach Apple decided either wouldn't work or was too
much trouble, and re-coded Mail instead....

I'm thinking it won't be an update that enables this.....
Click to expand...

Not exactly. What Apple did was to keep its existing mailbox file format but
create separate files for each message as well; these separate files are
what's used by Spotlight and they point to the correct part of the mailbox.
I guess that's what the Mac BU could use for Entourage, but they'd have to
do it with emails, tasks, calendar events, contacts and anything that might
need indexing.

Prepare for both a wait and hard drive bloat...
 
M

Michael Jardine

Not exactly. What Apple did was to keep its existing mailbox file format but
create separate files for each message as well; these separate files are
what's used by Spotlight and they point to the correct part of the mailbox.
I guess that's what the Mac BU could use for Entourage, but they'd have to
do it with emails, tasks, calendar events, contacts and anything that might
need indexing.

Prepare for both a wait and hard drive bloat...
Click to expand...

Thanks all. I guess that explains the long wait. As for the hard drive
bloat, I doubt the indexing will add that much to the total size of an
Entourage file, maybe a few megabytes at the most - the size of one iTunes
song :)
 
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