Weird gray line and disappearing folder

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Title: Weird gray line and disappearing folder

Hi,

I'm running EntX on 10.2 and have been working away to get things organised so I can archive stuff and slim down before problems get worse.

But I seem to be losing the battle.

A few days ago, the folder of emails from my wife started going weird. (The folder has more than 3000 messages. We met f2f 6 years ago but got to know each by email so there are lots of precious messages there.) Three lines from the top was a weird hatched gray space instead of the info about a message. The space sometimes grew to 8 or 10 spaces, but if I clicked on the spaces from below, the messages would reappear, right up to the last one. At which point an error message appeared saying that the mail action could not be completed.

Last week I forwarded lots of messages from my wife's machine to transfer about a thousand tiff files from a zip disk. (Her Mac has a Zip Drive and mine does not.) I don't know if that caused the problem, but I moved those out of her folder just in case.

Now, this morning, I see there is a message in the folder from her, but whenever I click on it to open the folder, Entourage "unexpectedly" quits, although it's beginning to feel less unexpected!

Naturally this happens while I'm on the road in Brussels rather than home in Scotland so not sure what to do. Any ideas are MOST welcome.

Thanks!

Walt