File deletions

With Windows 95 and OE 5.5 is it safe to delete all .mbx and .idx files, and just keep the .dbx files?

Do the mbx/idx files serve any significant purpose?

Grateful for advice.

 

Yes they do.

 

It is also safe to delete the growing .dbx files, they rebuild to default size.

 

Be careful here. You may be able to delete some of them but you can't just delete all of them unless you've archived any mail messages you want to keep. Those dbx files are your mail files and if your into the newsgroups there'll be a dbx file for each of those too. It' does no harm to delete the newsgroup ones but the mail ones might be another story. It's obvious enough which are which by the name of the file. You can get them all down to original size by deleting the messages in OE and then compacting the folder. For the newsgroup ones, if you just want to trim down one or two of them you can right click on one of them in OE and choose properties. Click the local file tab. Click on the delete button and after it deletes the messages, click compact. To do them all at once, in OE click tools>maintenance>clean up now. This will do all the newsgroups at once but won't touch your mail files.

You may see some dbx files in the OE folder that are for newsgroups that you've checked out at one time or another but never subscribed to or else at one time you were subscibed to them but unsubscribed from them some where along the way. These are safe to delete.

 

Thanks to all for advice.

I understand that the .mbx and.idx. folders originate for use with OE4 and have no relevance to OE 5.5 which never needs to access them.

I realise that if I needed to import the old messages contained in these folders when I was for a short time using OE4, then there is a procedure for doing this at:

http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/faqs/how.htm#importOE4

But as I have no need for this I'm just going to say goodbye to them and stick with OE 5.5's .dbx folders.

 

Sun java, ICQ, and a few other apps also create .idx (index) files.

Eudora still uses .mbx files.

But you are probably correct about them being OE4 left over things. If you have all old posts that you want imported from OE4 into a later version, you won't need the files. But if the .mbx files are missing, you can't move OE4 posts into 5.5 or above. Probably not 5.0 either but I'm not sure about that.