When all of us at the office upgraded to OS X we wanted to ditch our old OS 9 software once and for all, so we opted to use MacMail rather than our old Outlook 2001 in a OS 9 window. All was going swimingly until some folks realized that we weren't receiving meeting notices. Of course, actually getting invited to meetings was somewhat unusual, so it took us a long time to figure it out.

So it was decided that a whole lot more money was going to be handed over to Bill Gates and we were all going to get our own spiffy copy of Microsoft Office (up until that point, we'd been using the PC in the corner when we needed Word.) Being the lucky bastard that gets to have my own email plus that of the domain name management address, I set up my two accounts, linked up Entourage to the Exchange server, and watched my new G5 1.2GHz machine fall to its knees.

You see, every time I clicked anywhere in Entourage, a couple hundred spam messages would fly into my inboxes, get fed through my filters, get filed into Junk, and I'd attempt to delete them. I could listen to my hard drive gronk for 9 hours a day.

I made the grave mistake of mentioning this to our rent-a-tech. He said he'd fix it. And well, he sort of did something. He made it so no more than say 100 messages could come through at any given time. But it also meant that there was this odd batch of mystery messages lurking somewhere... the "unread message" counts were going up even though my folders were empty.

This whole thing came to a head when I had to watch my domain name email over the weekend. I logged in to the web mail (in Internet Explorer, I might add, because Exchange web mail doesn't acknowlege that Safari exists) and found over a thousand messages from varying dates all living in my inbox -- even though my Entourage inbox said it was empty.

Half an hour of click-delete later, I managed to cull it down so I could actually watch for my stupid Network Solutions/Open SRS emails (a different bitch session entirely.)

When I got into work this morning, I decided to do something radical... I put all my Entourage settings to the most standard things possible -- check every half hour, check everything, delete when I log out instead of often, etc. etc. Then I did something unheard of...

... I turned my junk mail filter off.

And wouldn't you freaking know it? I'm only getting about a hundred messages a day instead of 7-800. My folder tallies actually match the number of messages I have. My hard drive was silent nearly all day. My only guess is that Entourage's junk mail filter doesn't know how to deal with Exchange server's message system and would constantly be sending the message in an endless loop of send and resend and file and refile and send and resend.

Microsoft, you suck.