Comments on: More on Entourage Vs Mail.app

By: smorr

smorr — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:04:50 +0000

This is a little harder than you may think. remember most attachments would not be clear text — so just base64 decoding them would not be enough because then you would more or less have to pipe the attachment though the mdimporter of whatever filetype it may be (word, excel, omni outliner, whatever) and then somehow associate that back to the email message.

One thing that may be possible is to add a metadata field “mailMessageAttachment” = “messageId” that would point back to the source message — and figure out how to return hits (in Mail) for those documents so that it would know to get the original message.

Not to say impossible, but not trivial in the least (and I have grokked a good understanding of Mail’s internals)

By: Alan Schmitt

Alan Schmitt — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 05:42:07 +0000

Jesse: it would indeed be great for someone to write such a plugin. I don’t know how difficult it would be though: one would need to somehow integrate with Mail.app (which does not seem to nicely expose its api), decode the base64 attachments (easy), and push everything back to Spotlight so that the right importer for the attachment is used.

I guess this is just one extra feature to add to a “perfect mail client” that I hope someone will write one day ;-)

By: Jesse David Hollington

Jesse David Hollington — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:57:01 +0000

Alan: After a bit more specific testing on my own, it seems I spoke too soon….

Mail.app does full-text index everything it can in an attachment, so text attachments are definitely included (in my case, I do get a lot of text attachments in the form of scripts and so forth, so it’s very useful to me). Entourage definitely does NOT present this information to Spotlight, since the metadata is creates does not include attachment data, even for text attachments.

The problem with attachments other than text files is that they are base-64 encoded, and at this time Spotlight doesn’t do any base-64 decodes when building it’s index.

In my case, the fact that I had many of my attachments already living in my Mail Downloads directory did allow Spotlight to find them, but at files that had been saved to my hard drive.

I don’t imagine that it would be an overly complex thing for an experienced programmer to write a Spotlight plug-in that would search the base-64 encoded portion of Mail.app messages, but it doesn’t appear to have been done by anybody yet.

Quirilio: The configuration is actually done in the Address Book app. You go into preferences, and select “Sync With Exchange” and then provide the particulars to your Exchange server, including the path to WebAccess, using an http:// URL.

Whether or not option two above works for you is dependent upon the Exchange server configuration and your firewall configuration (at the Exchange server). Some organizations block port 80 to the Exchange server to force their users to use SSL (HTTPS) connections.

The simplest way to test this is to fire up your web browser and see if you can get at Outlook Web Access using an http:// url (as opposed to https).

By: Quirilio Vilorio III

Quirilio Vilorio III — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 22:22:19 +0000

Thank you all. Jesse, pardon my ignorance, but how can I implement option number two with mail.app., do I have to configure something on the windows exchange server side? or just my mac?

By: Alan Schmitt

Alan Schmitt — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:50:45 +0000

Jesse: this is intereresting to know. I had decided against a Mail.app storage of documents because of this, but I’ll need to check more thoroughly which file types are indexed and which are not.

By: Jesse David Hollington

Jesse David Hollington — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 19:34:20 +0000

Quirillo: I posted a reply in the comments above, but it seems to be “awaiting moderation” so I’m not sure if you can see it.

Alan: I haven’t tested this specifically with a PDF file, so it’s possible these aren’t indexed by spotlight properly. However, I know that Word/Excel documents, text attachments, and Pages documents are all indexed by Spotlight in Mail.app, but *not* in Entourage. This is basically because Spotlight doesn’t index Entourage’s database content directly, but rather only metadata that is specifically exposed by Entourage, and attachments are not exposed this way.

By: Alan Schmitt

Alan Schmitt — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 11:18:46 +0000

I’m really surprised about this “Entourage, despite its Spotlight integration, does not do full-text searching of attachments (Mail.app does).” I experimented with this a while ago, and found that attachments are not scanned by spotlight.

To test, I created a pdf using pages with some crazy string, and searched for the string using spotlight. It was found. I then put it as an attachment in an email message and erased the original. I then searched for the string and could not find it.

Did I miss something in my tests?

By: yit

yit — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:00:07 +0000

The manual from Kerio is maybe useful. You can download it from their site. In the manual is a chapter about configuring Addressbook/iSync with Kerio (or Exchange). There are also chapters about Entourage (vX/2004), iCal en Mail.app

By: Quirilio Vilorio III

Quirilio Vilorio III — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:03:12 +0000

Thanks, but we do use Windows Small Business Server. I would appreciate someone that can help me configure the Exchange Server in order to accept the Address Book Sync.

By: yit

yit — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:25:46 +0000

I use Kerio Mailserver which “fakes” a Exchange server. Kerio is much cheaper than Exchange and it has a great webmail (better/nicer than OWA). The integration of Entourage with Kerio is better than mail.app with Kerio. There is also a Outlook Connector, so the integration Outlook with Kerio is also good. Just download it from Kerio.com and you will be surprised.
A great solution: Kerio on a XServe and Entourage on the OSX-clients and Outlook on the Win-clients. For the web-workers the webmail.