How to export Entourage X email database and import to Entourage 2004?

Is there any particular reason you have to use Entourage? The MS mail clients are notorious for hosing mail databases, and for being buggy as all hell. We get questions about them here all the time. If possible can you switch to the OS X mail client? It's a FAR superior piece of software with much better spam filtering, standard mbox formats, and fewer bugs.

Try copying the files in Office X identities into Office 2004 identities inside your Documents/Microsoft User Data folder. Entourage 2004 works perfectly with my X identities and I don't remember doing anything special. To each his own, but imho, Entourage is one microsft product that is far superior to Apple's mail. As for spam filtering, Entourage X's spam filitering sucked....dunno about Entourage 2004...I just use SpamSieve and it works great.

Entourage is terrible compared to OS X's Mail. We get questions about it all the time here. Either hosed databases, butchered display, lack of standards support, etc. I cant remember the last Q here where someone lost an OS X mail database. Not even sure we've had one.

That hardly means OS X's mail doesn't have problems....you just have to go to apple's discussion forums for mail to read about it's issues.

Far far fewer and less dramatic issues. I've got clients using both and the ones using any of the MS mail clients have far more problems. As soon as I migrate them over, the problems cease, they end up with less spam in the inbox, HTML email looks better, they get the benefit of better searching, and they can do whatever they like with their mailboxes, rather than being locked into a MS system.

going through apple's discussion forums I can see quite a few on lost mails and one recent one on a corrupt mailbox.   My main problem with Mail is that it's support for POP accounts is terrible. It does not allow you to selectively delete messages from the server while keeping them on your HD. It follows a all or nothing approach. Also, it's new mail notification in the dock does not work when you have rules setup to automatically move messages from the inbox to other folders. It also updates when the mail remains in the Inbox. I have never really understood Apple's logic behind that.
Mail does look better than entourage...but it is in no way better, either feature wise or in stability (at least in my experience). It has it's fair share of problems. I have tried every version of mail released with each point upgrade of OS X..and gone back to entourage in about half an hour.

One on a lost mailbox. There are MANY here about lost Entourage mailboxes.
To delete from the server, but keep on your drive, use IMAP. That's what it's there for.
Last I checked Entourage didnt even have a dock notification for new email. You can have Mail show all unread in the dock, regardless of whether it's been redirected to a subfolder or not, with http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21431
Entourage is also a serious ram and CPU hog. Currently my Mail.app is at 0% CPU and 16MB ram. There are lots of reports of Entourage maxing out the CPU for extended periods.

one on a lost mailbox in recent times...i am sure the number would be close to the number here for entourage if you were to go over all 1229 posts.
I haven't used IMAP much but as far as I know it doesn't allow you to selectively choose which mails to keep on server and on disk. I prefer POP anyways...I know POP supports this feature and so does Eudora, Thunderbird, Entourage and possibly every other email client out there.
I have seen that little program you can install to show all unread mail in the dock. To me it's like a haxie, and I'd rather stay away from them. It's a simple enough feature which again almost every email client out there supports.
As for Entourage being a CPU and RAM hog my mac has been up now for 3 days and 11 hours. Entourage's CPU usage is at 0.5% and 31MB RAM. The RAM usage may not be as low as Mail, but you get a calendar, address book, tasks, notes and project centre thrown in...each of which are different applications if you go the Apple way (I prefer and use address book anyways...my point being there is hardly a performance hit worth noting even for extended periods of use)

You can't argue with the number of posts we get here about MS mail client problems. I've been here a long time and seen it all. The MS mail client issues FAR FAR FAR outweigh the OS X mail client issues.

this is a email problem that one of our clients is experiencing. I did try to copy the EntourageX identity folder to Entourage 2004. but Entourage2004 doesn't recoganize the identity. instead, the database rebuild window will come up if you choose the newly copied identity from 2004. and after rebuild, i go into the mailbox, all mails gone.
It is so frustrating. any idea?

Jerry Jay

In the office folder there is a database utility. Try using that on your identity and seeing if it helps.
Otherwise, create a new identity in X. Import items from your previous identity into this one...hopefully that will work. Once that is done, see if 2004 will recognize your new identity.
Otherwise, since you are having trouble with the calendar, try importing the data in iCal. If that works, export from iCal and then import from entourage

Thank you very much for your advice. I did try to create a new identity in old EntourageX, and try to import data into it. but EntourageX doesn't recoganize the identity either. BTW, I rebuilt the database, but no help.

I've  never used iCal, is this part of Macintosh OS? or a shareware that I can download from internet?

Jerry Jay