Why EntourAid?
EntourAid attempts what Entourage wouldn't for now (as of 26 Mar 2002). It trys to repair corrupted Entourage emails, especially those hit by the 2GB limit bug. EntourAid was not designed for Outlook Express but, in some test cases, it has worked on corrupted OE databases.

But how about this and that?
Extensive tests have nominal yields of between 70% to 90% of full email recovery (attachments included). For other details, the download included ReadMe documentation helps too.

Can you help me with...?
For any tech issues, please email Sol Iglesias at info@thepropellerheads.com

How did you...?
EntourAid started out as an OS 9 AppleScript/BBEdit script when a colleague's email crashed a year ago. Then last week another colleague's email died (from the 2GB limit). Nobody, including Microsoft, seemed to be able to help, so I rewrote the whole thing to survive without BBEdit...

Technical
Notes

Minimum System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.1.2, preferrably with at least 256 MB of RAM

NOTE: EntourAid has not yet been tested with Mac OS X Tiger

Important!
So far, up to 4% of users have reported problems with EntourAid not being able to recover the corrupted emails properly. Please try out the trial version BEFORE paying for the full version, as we do not entertain requests for refunds. The full version will only have a decent chance of working if the following conditions are met for the trial version:

1. At least 19 emails recovered (with attachments, if any, intact)
2. RecoveredEmails.mbox file is less than 100MB

Known Issues

1. EntourAid saves a new database file. Make sure you have enough space for it or EntourAid will quit with an error before completing its tasks.
2. Recovered emails will all be in one database, importable into one folder.
3. Only received emails are recovered. Items in the Sent Items folder cannot be recovered for now.
4. Large recovered email databases take big goobs of time to be digested in Entourage. To ease this pain, we recommend you split up your orginal database into smaller bits before running EntourAid on them. If you don't know how to split a file, we have created Splitter, a utility for you to do this.
   

On 3 June 2002, Microsoft finally released an update to Office vX, which states, amongst 1499 other improvements:

"Improvements in Entourage X:
* Database improvements: The size limit for Entourage X databases has been increased from 2GB to 4GB. Entourage X also can rebuild some damaged databases that could not be rebuilt before."

In light of this update, development of EntourAid is on hold until further notice. We would like to thank all EntourAid customers who have supported us these few months. Support for our existing clients will continue as before. It has been REAL interesting developing EntourAid, and we look forward to creating more software that will help Macintosh users get the most out of their machines.

1. Split the files using our freeware Splitter. It's easier for EntourAid to digest small chunks of data rather than a 2GB behemoth at one go
http://www.thepropellerheads.com/software/splitter/splitter.html
Of course, some attachments would get split up and the percentage of total recovered data would be slightly lower ...

2. Ensure you have enough free memory on your hard drive for that. Split files eat up additional storage space equal to the size of the original.

3. Use a reasonably fast computer. The faster the processor, the better.

4. Devote TIME to exclusively process the corrupt data. The bigger the file size, the more time you'll need. Maybe even a whole day. So, start processing one split file, grab a beer, chill out, turn your Mac up to full volume and wait for the "ting!" sound when it's done.

5. When you're done, the email messages will be recovered but not the folders they were originally in. It would help to organize email by date (e.g. one folder per month or quarter) and re-organize by theme/category later.

6. Entourage itself allows you to recover contacts in the recovered email. Simply create a rule (Tools/Rules/Create New Rule) that says something like "if From Is Not In Address Book, Then Add Sender To Address Book." Then ensure that you're in the Main Window, and apply the rule (Message/ApplyRule/Rule Name).

7. Just a reminder: Sent Mail currently can't be recovered*, unless they were moved to folders other than the Sent Mail Folder (although you could try looking for mail from your email address among the recovered messages--you could get lucky). Nor can reminders, calendar data, notes. Also, some email will have no subject headings or from, and will have a lot of gibberish or you'll find email that runs into each other. That's normal ... Your data has been corrupted so there's bound to be some mis-recovered messages. The good news is, more often than not, these are trashed messages that, ironically, re-surface.

*EntourAid can't recover them because, unlike some other email applications, Entourage does not store them with a full header. So EntourAid can't distinguish it from the rest of the junk in the corrupted database. Also, as a result, you may find parts of your Sent Main at the end of other messages because they are difficult to distinguish from a legitimate contnuation of the previous item in the database.