Entourage users: please DO NOT create folders with leading or trailing spaces in their names!

When creating a folder with a leading or trailing space in the name, Entourage will quietly generate an error as follows:

Error

Could not synchronize record: <foldername> to Exchange server: <identity name>

Explanation

The folder save operation failed due to invalid property values.

Error: -19918

However, Entourage will then proceed to behave as if the folder creation actually worked, display the misnamed folder in the folder tree, and allowing messages to be dropped into it.  Looking at the same mailbox via Outlook, the misnamed folder never appears, and the “moved” messages remain where they originally are. (Verified with testing using Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition, version 13.0.4 (100208).)

I note that Outlook will strip leading or trailing whitespace from folder names when creating them, as does Apple’s Mail.app.

I’m not the first to notice this issue: http://blogs.technet.com/b/pawan/archive/2010/03/02/issue-with-synchronizing-folders-in-entourage-ews-which-are-created-with-trailing-or-ending-spaces.aspx

On a potentially related note, it seems that one of our users actually managed to create a folder with a trailing space on our Exchange 2007 SP1 system (I assume that this was done using an older, pre-EWS version of Entourage), which created a world of woes when trying to merge his restored mailbox contents from a Recovery Storage Group. I need to perform some more testing to verify that the trailing whitespace was the source of the problem with restore-mailbox, which might be tricky if I can’t figure out how to create a test folder with trailing whitespace in the name to begin with.  I’ll follow up on that later once I have had a chance to do some testing.