Outlook Express has exterminated me! Help!

[Chrissie]

Closed down last night leaving machine (XP) doing automatic Windows Updates.  This morning the Web is working OK, I still have all Favourites and sites such as this one remember who I am with no need to re-enter password.

BUT - on opening Outlook Express, all my accounts have disappeared and I appear to have no history of emails sent or received[:@].  (Funnily enought, the address book seems intact.)

Question 1.  If I "Add" all my email addresses (which are all on orange or wanadoo), will I get my history back?

Question 2.  In order to add the accounts, it asks me for server details etc.  All I can remember are the actual account names and passwords - the piece of paper with things like "stmp" and "pop" details has of course been spirited away by aliens.  Can someone fill those in for me?

Here's hoping......

Chrissie (81)

 

[Chrissie]

Have managed a slight improvement - did a search for *.dbx items and imported them into Outlook Express - this has given me all the emails I had when using wanadoo as my server, but nothing since converting to orange accounts about 6 months ago - are they under another title somewhere on the hard disk?

Someone please help!!!

Chrissie (81)

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

Do a search for a *.psd file. That will be your outlook emails.

Also there may be an archive file as well.

[DerekJ]

[quote user="Mr Coeur de Lion"]Do a search for a *.psd file. That will be your outlook emails.

Also there may be an archive file as well.[/quote]

I don't think so.... .psd files are Photoshop image files.

I think Outlook Express files are .dbx

[tel]

Hi,

It's a while since I used Outlook Express however - have you checked your identity profile?, click 'File' > 'Identities' and see if you have more than one identity profile, if you have, switch from one to the other to see if your messages are available.

Hope this helps

 

Regards

[tel]

[quote user="DerekJ"][quote user="Mr Coeur de Lion"]Do a search for a *.psd file. That will be your outlook emails. Also there may be an archive file as well.[/quote]

I don't think so.... .psd files are Photoshop image files.

I think Outlook Express files are .dbx
[/quote]

I think Mr Coeur de Lion means .pst files (MS Outlook backup) However the OP is using Outlook Express not Outlook.

Regards

 

[Chrissie]

Thanks for all your suggestions - I have neither *.psd nor *.pst files.  I have managed to reload the wanadoo and orange mail accoun names and get it checking for new mail an all these, but still cannot access anything between this morning and end Aug 2009.  New mail seems to be coming in fine.

I think the identity thing may be a problem - I apparently have two identities "chris.jones" and "Main Identity" - there are no properties available for Main Identity and it refuses to switch to this anyway, saying that it is in use by another application (although all other programmes wereclosed.)  I tried deselecting the box that asks for usage of "chris.jones" when starting programmes, and then closed down and restarted OE, but all that had happened was a new mail connection called blank had been created as default.....

Something else I wondered about is that I have one new message from Wanadoo welcoming me as a new user(!) to OE6  and the version I have does seem to be OE6 although I think we upgraded some time ago.  Should I now re-upgrade to OE8 or OE9?  Not sure how to do this or if it will be any use anyway. 

Oh dear, I have wasted all day on this dratted machine.[:(]

Chrissie (81)

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

Ooo that isn't so good if you cannot find those files. Are you sure you have scanned your entire hard drive for them? Just double check again.

Upgrading to OE8 will not have any impact on your emails. I would definitely upgrade from OE6, it is as much use as Gordon Brown, it's that bad.

[Department71]

One thing you can try to find e-mails;

Open Outlook Express, click on tools at top of screen, options, maintenance tab, there is a "store folder" button  if you click this it should show where e-mails are stored.

If you want to tidy this up a bit, I made a new folder in My Docs called it oeemails, then went into the tools etc in Outlook Express and clicked on the button to change location. Now all e-mails are stored where I know where they are.

I have no problem with Outlook Express, wife has that stupid Windows mail on her laptop, just can't get along with it.

Steve

[tenniswitch]

In the past, we would sometimes discover that after updates, our mail default would become Outlook, rather than Outlook Express.  Are you sure this hasn't happened?

If not, and if you're absolutely sure that you haven't done something (other than the updates) to delete your email files, you might as a last resort try a System Restore to the point before you downloaded the updates.

If that works, you could then download and install the updates 1 by 1 (in hopes of avoiding the culprit).  If it doesn't work, you can undo the Restore.

[Chrissie]

The plot thickens - I re-checked the *.dbx items as suggested and got the same list up as before.  It appears as a list of folders and I realised that there were more of these than had been transferred across using "Import" from a holding file I had copied them to.  There is for example a folder of mails that I created in February.  That folder is in the holding file but OE hasn't imported it.  I tried copying it on its own to a new holding file and them tried to Import from that, but was told there were no items to import or items might be in use elsewhere and not available.

What is going on?  I notice that this folder has a different string of letters after it than some of the ones that have been transferred.  In fact, the files some in blocks of strings (? different identities).  In which case, I assume all the recent stuff in each folder is under one or more different identities.

Any ideas?.......

Chrissie

 

[Danny]

Chrissie,

Outlook Express (OE) 6 is the last available version. After Windows XP, Outlook express was replaced by Windows Mail in Vista and Windows Live Mail in Windows 7.

version 8 etc is referring to Internet Explorer updates and nothing to do with your mail.

For each identity, OE has a set of folders labelled with a string of numbers.

This is normally found in C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{37FB2230-26A4-4B7A-92DD-7125EF589640}\Microsoft\Outlook Express
The names may be slightly different in yours. If you have two identities you will have two folders with long number/letter names for each identity.

For ease, you can make a shortcut to these folders once you have located them, right click on folder and select 'send to', then 'desktop(create shortcut)'

So, I suggest you go to these folders and for each one, click on the folder,open it, find all the .dbx files for each one and copy and paste them to a new folder somewhere else (maybe on your desktop for simplicity - right click, select new, folder and name it) and label each one clearly so you know what is what. It would also be a good idea to save them somewhere else - on a memory stick, CD or external hard drive. You can leave the folders intact, just copy all the .dbx files from each one.

This will save all of your mail files anyway.

There are two things I suggest trying, once you have saved all the folders carefully elsewhere

1 - OE looks for the mail files in the location referred to before. You can simply delete the files that are there and copy and paste the files from your saved folders one lot at a time  - i.e copy and paste all the .dbx files from one identity folder you created to that folder where OE looks for the files.
alternatively, you can open OE and go to tools/options/maintenance and click on 'store folder', then 'change' and browse to the folder you created on the desk top. You can do this for each identity, open up OE and see what mails you can see....

As long as you have saved all the .dbx files somewhere safe you can undo all of this if necessary....

2 The other problem with OE files is that if they are big files - i.e. have lots of emails going back forever...- they can become corrupted and OE can't read them properly. This can be a pain...
Quite often though, the file that is corrupted is the file called folders.dbx which is one of the .dbx files in each identity folder. This file acts as identifier of all the other .dbx files. This is safe to delete and OE will generate a new folders.dbx file when you open it, which will not be corrupted. This is worth trying for each identity.

Remember, if you have all the .dbx files saved somewhere else, then you can just paste them back to the Store folder and you will be back where you were again...

Just try to be methodical and logical and you should be OK BUT....

...if this is too much for you, don't do it!!!

Hope this is of use - phew!

Danny

[Chrissie]

Thanks to all of you, especially Danny, for all the helpful replies.  I shall certainly be looking at the store location and also trying the file transfers on individual strings of folders that Danny suggests.  Am not so panicky now I KNOW they are still on the machine.  Have also realised what a load of junk we keep through sheer laziness and hopefully this will prompt me into doing a big clear-out.  By the way, the first thing I tried was a "System Restore" but it told me, as always, that there had been no changes in the last week and so it could not restore.......

BUT, today we have brilliant sunshine, so stuff the computer, it's dog-walking and then a bit of golf this morning!

Chrissie (81)