[ghills]

opened up outlook express this am. My inbox was completely empty whereas when I closed it down there were around 20 messages displayed. Messages aren't in deleted or any other folder. Does anyone have any ideas?:

[Augie65]

Your Inbox.dbx might be corrupted. Here is a guide to find and/or try to repair the folder. If the corrupt file is Inbox.dbx, Outlook Express will sometimes create a new one and append a number to its name, such as Inbox(1).dbx and the new one will appear empty.

[white owl]

Or the folders.dbx file could have been corrupted.

You can go to your Store folder location (found by going into Tools/Maintenance in OE and clicking on Store Folder - copy the location and put it in the address bar in Windows Explorer). Go through the folders and see what is there. Sounds like you don't have a lot of email so it should be extra easy.

Then you can open up first your Inbox.dbx foler in Note Pad and see what is there. If it is basically empty (it will be obvious), you have lost your emails, and Outlook Express is the culprit. If your emails are there (though in a very interesting plain text format), they are still there and can be recovered. Immediately backup the store folder!!! Copy it into another place, preferably another partition, and give it a clear name. Don't lose what you have.

Let us know what you find....

[terry1930]

I have never had success with reading dbx file with Notepad.

To read a 'dbx' file you need 'DBXtract.exe'. It's a free program. You can find it through Google. It extracts the data and saves it in the original 'eml' form. You can then doubleclick that file and resave it into your Outlook Express or just keep it on your hard drive.