Entourage Duex

March 14, 2004

My post on 1/26/2004 also went up on http://www.macosxhints.com/. A few comments were made on MacOSXHints regarding incoming messages and troubleshooting the same problem by turning off the Preview Pane.

I make it a general rule to turn off the preview pane on systems I set up. Also, I give users a stern warning that the preview pane is probably the #1 reason that viruses get through-- plus it instantly identifies you to those spammers who include a reference graphic in their junk mail.

Regarding the issue where incoming mail can cause Entourage to crash, this is not uncommon either, and the exact same problem can affect Outlook Express. I get a call on this about every 3 weeks or so (I have 300+ email users to tend to). We run an email server based on EIMS for about 30 companies (well, 10 now that we've begun to transition users to a different server). From time to time a message will come in that has a stray CR or LF (not sure which one) and this causes the MS products to freak-out. A trip to webmail, or the excellent shareware POPMonitor, usually reveals a piece of junk mail that is the culprit-- and it is usually the very first item in the list.

Now that we've moved to a Linux-based server running Exim & Courier, this problem is gone. Apparently there is a filter for EIMS that is supposed to prevent this, but I find that it doesn't always catch the errant messages.