Leopard, Entourage, and Exchange out of sync

I work at a rather large place with hundreds of PCs and only a handful of OSX machines. Luckily, I happen to be one of the few OSX people.

We use Entourage, which is Microsoft’s wanna-be Outlook app for OSX, along with Exchange for all our e-mail needs. Normally things work without a hitch, however recently a few people using Entourage started experiencing some oddities.

What started happening:

• Inbox will not sync. At all. A quick check to the webmail interface shows all the mail is there.
• Other folders such as Deleted Items, Spam, Drafts synce without issues.
• E-mail can be sent without errors.
• No errors, warnings, dialogs, etc shown.
• Other users with the exact same config experienced no problems.

After doing some quick research there is a quick fix:

• Right click  the Inbox Folder (in your Exchange account) and choose “Folder Properties”.
• Locate the “Empty Cache” section in the middle of the window.
• Click the “Empty” button.

That’s it. It will take a few minutes to resycn but once it is done things should be back to normal. Since this has only happened – randomly – to a few users I’m still not sure what caused/causes it.

Now if only Entourage wasn’t so terrible.