How I Lost 30 pounds of excess Entourage weight and kept if off!

[sequoia]

Title: How I Lost 30 pounds of excess Entourage weight and kept if off!

Thanks for the thread called "Entourage Just Works, always".  I learned a couple good points:

1. Removing attachments is a good idea, but they won't get removed (make the DB smaller) until DB is compacted.
2. DB has a limit of 4 gigs, or 1 million objects (and objects include many other things besides emails and attachments)
3. Barry's 'Count the Mail script is damn cool. Can't give an objects count (to see how close you are to the million limit), but it does give me the following info:

Identity: Main Identity
Folders: 125
Messages: 14,170
Data Folder Size: 745mb

I'll also mention a method I've been using to keep my Entourage 2004 Identity with a nice slim waistline. I use my Deleted Items folder as more than just a junk/toss folder (reminds me of using "Signatures" as more than just sigs). It's just the resting place for emails that I don't think I'll actually need but do want to keep. To keep it separate from the Real Junk, I make sure every email has a category. That way, I can periodically open up the Delete Folder, sort by Category, and completely delete three categories: Junk, News Groups, and None. Junks is self-explanatory. News Groups is just the name I give to any groups, forums, auto-replies, companies that send me updates, just any emails that I want to get, but don't want to keep beyond the initial read. The None category takes a bit of time, since None is the default given to any email that doesn't have a category. But I find this exercise useful, since it forces me to decide if any of my incoming emails need to be given a category, so that they don't get permanently deleted.

Next, I do is to sort by size. This forces the largest attachments up to the top. After a quick scan to make sure that I either already have a copy now on my hard drive, or it's something I no longer want, I highlight them, and then use the very cool Remove All Attachments (Menu: Message).

The next step I now know I have to do is compact the Identity, to truly remove all the junk I just exorcised.

The last step I do I only do at the beginning of each year, and this came from a tip from Beth Rosengard. I duplicate the database. I call the old one I name last year (say 2004). The new one I name 2005. In this new one, I do a pretty dirty/inexact massive delete. I basically remove most stuff older than 6 months. I don't do this with everything—I don't delete customer orders and some projects. But I slash and burn pretty much everything else, knowing that if I removed something I truly need, it's there in the backed up 2004 database.

Sequoia