I use Outlook Express as my email program. It was doing the regular compacting messages thing yesterday, and then ran across an error that said that it could not do something with a particular folder, and then it closed out. I went into Outlook express, and I am now missing about two months of emails.
There is nothing earth shattering that I am missing, but it would be nice to have the emails is they are recoverable.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
> I use Outlook Express as my email program. It was doing the regular compacting messages thing yesterday, and then ran across an error that said that it could not do something with a particular folder, and then it closed out. I went into Outlook express, and I am now missing about two months of emails.
>
> There is nothing earth shattering that I am missing, but it would be nice to have the emails is they are recoverable.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks in advance.
A little research tells me it might be a corrupt .dbx file.
Here is a discussion on the topic: http://forums.techarena.in/windows-xp-support/741619.htm
And this: http://www.freebits.co.uk/recover-oe-email.html instructs you how to change the .dbx file, if this is your problem.
I've had Outlook Express do this to me on several occasions. My research indicated that OE tends to do this when the .dbx files get large (lots of stored messages or lots of attachments). I started looking for an easy way to back-up the messages and discovered that OE doesn't have a built in back up procedure.
I settled on a layered approach. I switched to Thunderbird for my email software because it has a very flexible archive function built in. This allows you to archive emails by month or by year into sub-folders. Each sub-folder is separate data file so that you don't run into corruption issues. The location for the archive files is customizable. That allows me to archive them on the same drive where I keep my CAD data which makes back-ups a breeze. I also set the software to always leave a copy of incoming emails on the server as an added precaution.
I had the same problem, changed to Thunderbird.
I'd also recommend Thunderbird, and maybe even switching from POP3 mail to IMAP if that is a possibility. If you download all your email to your computer, and the database gets corrupted, then it's gone. At least with IMAP, it is stored on a server and you can access it from many different computers/devices.
