Contents of Sent Messages Folder Disappeared

I use Outlook Express for my email. Last night just before I logged off the computer I noticed a "Compacting Folders" message come up. This morning when I logged on, half of my received messages were gone, as were the entire contents (over 3 years worth) of the copies of my sent messages.

This is a disaster. I can get back the received messages -- I have copies elsewhere. Anyone know how to get back the sent messages?

Thanks.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;270670

 

This is why I strongly urge people to backup their email.

There are several methods, one is to use an extraction program such as DBXtract,
http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx

This allows you to extract a copy of the contents or any of Outlook Expresses folders (each of which is saved as a single compressed .dbx file) . They are saved to a folder of your choice as individual .eml files just as if you had done file / save as for each one individually, but it will save them all at once. You can then burn this file to a backup CD so it is safe.


The other method involves using a second email client and maybe even a second email account.
You could use mozilla mail or thunderbird as a client
http://www.mozilla.org/
Or use a hotmail or gmail web based secondary account.
Then you set one client to "leave a copy on server" under its tools/ options /server
You always check this one first, and then download a duplicate to OE.
When you send , you BCC a second copy to your other (hotmail or gmail ) account or to yourself.

The problem you now face is that when OE closes, it overwrites the existing .dbx file with a new one. Thus just like opening a word document, deleting its contents and saving it, you loose the data which was there before.
Sometimes you will get lucky and can actually find that they were saved in different locations and you can recover the old one with something like
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
or
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

If so, then you can use dbxtract to extract a copy.

 

Thanks for the information. I learned my lesson, and have burned about four years of received emails to a CD for backup.

As mentioned, though, all my sent emails are gone. I bought the DBXpress program and had it save what it could. Now I have thousands (maybe even 100,000) of emails in a folder, each an individual .eml file, some of which are sent emails and some of which are received emails.

I would like to sort from this mess all the sent emails, and then order them by date in a .dbx file that I could use in Outlook Express. How do I do that?

Thanks.

 

Sorry, I thought I gave the link to the free version.

You can run DBXtract and just choose one folder / file such as inbox.dbx and it will just back up that one. So you save those to one folder, inbox. Repeat for the others.

The problem now is that they will be sorted by file name and that the created date has nothing to do with the date they were sent/ recieved; it will all be identical.

You could create some new folders in OE and copy things there first. Like create an InboxDec04, and copy all Dec04 emails (edit, select first , hold shift, select last , copy and paste ) then use dbxtract to backthis single folder up. Then delete it and create a new one for Jan05.

 

Oshwyn5,

Thanks for your assistance. I got everything squared away now. The reason I spent the $25 to use DBXpress instead of DBXtract was to get messages off the hard disk that were not in a .dbx file.

I do not know where DBXpress found all the sent messages that were missing, but it did find many of them. Some of them are garbage now, but I checked for the important ones, and they are there.

DBXpress put the messages in a new file on a new disk partition as individual .eml files. At first, I could not figure out how to get those individual .eml files back into a .dbx file in Outlook Express. Finally, looking at your message, you said to select and drag the email messages into an Outlook Express folder. I did that, and it worked.

Everything has now been backed up now. So if this happens again, I'll be in better shape. I hope that I have turned off automatic compacting -- I tried to follow the instructions from another thread on how to do that -- since that is what caused to messages to disappear in the first place.

Thanks again.

 

Good to hear. I hadn't thought of dragging em back.
Glad it worked out for you.

Nothing is perfect and disasters happen so backups of any and all important data is crucial.