Entourage causing frantic problems for fanatical Rackspace

Everybody’s favorite Apple email client Microsoft Entourage apparently contains a serious bug that threatens data integrity on Microsoft Exchange servers, according to service provider Rackspace.

In an email alert to paying customers, Rackspace announced they “have uncovered an issue with Microsoft’s WebDAV protocol used by Entourage.” This deadly serious issue can “result in storage being disabled for all mailboxes on the same storage node,” they go on to explain. Lovely.

Given that Exchange support is one of the few draws to this horrible piece of Apple software, the problem is bound to be a critical one for its unfortunate users.

Certainly Rackspace is taking no chances and plans on isolating Entourage users on separate servers, hoping to quickly eliminate the risks of this problem causing bigger issues for users of its hosted exchange product.

The full email alert follows:

Urgent notice:

Rackspace may be required to disable Microsoft Entourage email client for Apple Macs access without advanced notice over the next few days.  We have uncovered an issue with Microsoft’s WebDAV protocol used by Entourage.  This sporadic issue results in storage being disabled for all mailboxes on the same storage node.  To prevent this Entourage issue from affecting our broader community and to preserve data integrity, WebDAV access for Entourage will be shut off on selected nodes.   Any affected Entourage users should consider using Outlook Web Access (OWA) through the login.

We understand the challenges presented by this situation and have escalated this issue to top Microsoft engineers and developers.  No effort is being spared to permanently resolve the situation as quickly as possible.

Our engineers have also brought online new servers and storage to move Entourage users to a dedicated environment, which will ensure maximum reliability. These moves will begin after business hours this evening and will continue until complete.

In order for your Entourage users to be moved to new servers, we ask that you identify the usernames of your Entourage users by calling, emailing, or using live chat to reach our support team (see contact information below).  Those users will be moved to a separate storage infrastructure that will allow us to more quickly patch and test a resolution when we receive the anticipated fix from Microsoft.

We appreciate your assistance in addressing this Microsoft Entourage specific issue.

Regards,
Rackspace Email & Apps

I’m sure I am not the only one looking forward to built-in Apple Mail support for Microsoft Exchange in the upcoming Snow Leopard release.