Office 2004 11.3.5 Special Report: Spotlight issues

Some users have reported that Spotlight chokes on Entourage files (with the .eml extension) after applying the Office 2004 11.3.5 update.

As pointed out by one reader, Office 2004 11.3.5 includes a new version of Entourage's Spotlight importer /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Entourage.mdimporter. The reader writes:

"The issue I am having here involves Spotlight going down on Entourage stored files (.eml): it crashes every time when I stick in a (new) non-previously indexed drive with stored emails. Other drives without stored emails work fine. I noticed that the 11.3.5 update adds a new version of Entourage's Spotlight search-file. [...] Culprit?."

As noted in our Troubleshooting Spotlight tutorial, Spotlight may not properly search Entourage data under some circumstances. There are a few fixes for this issue:

• Open Entourage's preferences and press "rebuild" under Spotlight Preferences
• Move the files Microsoft Entourage.mdimporter and Microsoft Office.mdimporter from /Library/Spotlight to ~/Library/Spotlight and then use the following command in the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilties): mdimport ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage/2004

Index:

• Release notes
• Preparing for the update
• Undoing the update

• Application crashes, fixes
• Documents will not open
• Entourage version number remains 11.3.3
• Exchange server synchronization bug
• Missing applications
• Spotlight issues

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