Outlook Express (archives?)

[Selwyn]

Hi, Gang! You guys have always come up trumps for me before - I hope you can do it again!

Various parts of my hardware began to die on me during the last week and eventually I had to give it to a techie for life-saving medical treatment. I asked him to save my mail for me if he needed to do anything drastic - like reformatting. In the event he didn't need to reformat but when I went into Outlook Express I found it completely empty - including the address book.

I recalled from quite a few years ago that the letters get saved in a special file so went looking for them and found them as .dbx files. The "size" column, in the search displays different sizes for all the many subfolders suggesting that all my letters are indeed intact but I can't seem to figure out how to retrieve/restore/return them to Outlook Express in an "as-was" format.

Can anyone please help with this and walk me through it with a step-by-step proceedure? I would - as usual - be so very grateful!

Yours,
Selwyn.

 

[bassetman]

Seeing you already know where your messages are, try this.

<IMG SRC="http://forums.techguy.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=692176">

John

 

[Selwyn]

Thanks for your prompt response. Bassetman - but I'm afraid it didn't work. Here is the full hard disk address that came up when I went into browse. When I tried to "open" I got a message saying the folder was empty. Yet my actual search for .dbx files came up with all my separate sub-folders as they existed before the "collapse" I'm still convinced by what I can see on my screen that my mail records are available. It is possible in my ignorance that I am still doing something wrong in spite of your help; any more ideas?


C:\WINOLD\Application Data\Identities\{FB4659C0-ED61-11D5-B5C5-8CC13D0B5637}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

 

[bassetman]

Try a Start/Find Files and Folders/ and enter *.dbx That should find the "old" files (also) where ever the techie put them.

You could then try Copy and Paste then if you still can't navigate to them.

The Find etc will also show you the file size.

John

PS The location you show is correct, but probably the re-created (empty) ones.

 

[Selwyn]

Hi, Bassetman! Our birthdays are 5 days apart! I'm on the 7th!!
Back to business-----I'm afraid this isn't working and I really can't figure out why! I even found a "word for word" description of my problem on microsoft's pages with absolutely fantastic directions (there was also a software programme called DBXtract that I also found and tried; it looked as if it was doing the job but the end result was the same).
Micro's. website URL is:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;283205

If you look it up you'll see how very precisely it details the problem and its cure - but every time I get there, I get an error message saying the folders are empty. This is difficult to believe because one can "see" that they all contain files- each folder has a very different KB size indicated which is consistent with there being different numbers of mails in all of them.

Any comments?
Selwyn.

 

[bassetman]

I found this http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/tools/#dbxtract may want to check it out.

On the BD thing

John