Gibberish

I've been wondering for a long time now if there is a way to convert gibberish into something readable, such as what I find when I try to look at my cache of Outlook Express messages. I went there to try to backup some of it.
(I just tried to copy and paste some of it here to show you but it would not copy and paste.)

Here is how I got there: In Windows Explorer, C:~Windows~Application Data~Microsoft~Outlook Express~Mail.

Carval

 

When you try to open a non-text file, such as the .dbx files Outlook Express uses to store email messages, in a text-edition program, you'll just get gibberish which is basically computer code.

The same thing will happen if you try to open a picture file...jpg, bmp, tif, gif, et al...in a text editor like Notepad, Wordpad, Word, etc.

You can download the free utility, DBXtract which can, as its name implies, extract email messages from those dbx files into a readable form.

Alternately, you can save individual messages in txt format by highlighting the message, then going to File>Save As, changing the file type to .txt and saving it with whatever name you prefer.

 

Thank you for your quick response Miz,

Will this work for Windows 98SE?
It seems that "Visual Basic 6" run time file is required. I pasted the instruction here:

As you are using Windows XP (after all this is a an XP site) you already have the required Visual Basic 6 run time files installed. There are no help files as the program is very easy to use.

Once you have downloaded the program place it into a new empty folder.

You then run it from there when you need it. (This utility will not install itself on your machine.)

 

That program will translate some of the machine language into something you can read. However, I don't think it will help you do what you want since copying parts of it will simply give you something useless.

Please give details on exactly what you want to copy.

Moving this to the IE/OE section.

 

Hi Newt,

I was just trying to back up some saved messages.

The copy and paste I referred to was only to give you all a sample of what I encountered when trying to back up.

Thank you for your attention