Possible to encrypt Entourage database?

[Jo*]

Hi there,

Espionage went onto my app-wishlist when I came across a post on the MacHeist forums. Thrilled to see that your app is going to be a Zot this weekend.

I was wondering if it is possible to encrypt the Entourage database similar to encrypting Apple's Mail as shown in your intro movie?

How would I go about this whilst making utterly sure I wouldn't corrupt the database or anything similarly dreadful. My email database is enormously valuable and precious to me.

I backup my entire home folder once a day (incl. the Entourage database) to an external drive. I assume the database being copied to the external drive would then be encrypted, too?

Thanks

Jo

[greg]

Hey Jo!

Although we wanted to, we did not include an application template for Entourage because of a bug in it associated with how it stores its emails for Spotlight.

Essentially, while there's no problem at all encrypting the Entourage database located here:

Code Select Expand

~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/your identity
There is a problem with its Spotlight data which it stores here:

Code Select Expand

~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage
That folder contains Spotlight-readable versions of all of your Entourage email so that you can search for it in Spotlight.  If you don't care about that ability then you can go right ahead and encrypt your entourage database and disable its Spotlight support in the preferences.

If you try to encrypt Entourage's metadata folder, Entourage will ignore it and will not update it as new emails arrive. We *have* contacted Microsoft's Mac Business unit about this problem a while ago, and they replied to us saying that they would look into the issue, but so far I don't think they've done anything about it. Please feel free to contact them though and let the know they should fix it!

To answer your other question, yes, it would be backed up encrypted. Though again, we encourage you to also make use of Espionage's built-in backups because they make restoring a folder easy.

[Jo*]

Hi Greg,

thanks a lot for your comprehensive reply.

If you happen to get a reply from MS that offers a fix to the spotlight issue maybe you could leave a post here.

Jo

[greg]

Sure thing, and another way you'll know is if Espionage suddenly gets an Entourage app template (keep an eye on the release notes).

[pwenzel]

This week I attempted to encrypt my Entourage 2008 database, and for the most part, it worked as expected.

However, the "Synchronize events and tasks with iCal and MobileMe" option would get disabled every time I closed and relaunched Entourage. If I had Entourage open and ticked it on, my calendars would sync up as expected. After relaunching, my calendar syncing would fail.

After disabling encryption with Espionage, calendar sync went back to working as normal.

If anyone has advice on making this work, while maintaining encryption with Espionage, I'd appreciate it!

Apologies for reviving an old thread.

[greg]

Hey pwenzel,

If anyone has advice on making this work, while maintaining encryption with Espionage, I'd appreciate it!

Apologies for reviving an old thread.

No worries, it's a good question, as it lets me update this thread to point out that Microsoft's new version of Office should work with Espionage. It no longer has Entourage, instead, there's a new version of Outlook that replaces it and in our tests seems to work well, and therefore we're recommending that users use Espionage with Outlook instead of Entourage, please see these instructions for how to use Espionage with it.