Outlook Express folder structure problem

In my Windows XP Pro (fully updated to July 2007) system, in Outlook Express 6 I have a storage folder which I transferred to My Documents (to facilitate backups) and renamed it My E-mails. This is a folder containing 1071 items totalling nearly 700 MB, which are files of type .dbx representing the folders which appear in the Outlook Express Local Folders list. The great majority of these are sub-folders and sub-sub-folders in two folders of mailing list archives. Other folders also have subs and sub-subs. They record over 6 years of E-mails including family, business and various organisations.

I copied this archive into my laptop where the same system XP Pro, fully updated, is installed. The file structure was lost: all items appear as main folders. This is extremely inconvenient. Currently I cannot access the record other than in my laptop - the system fails to complete booting in my PC, and that is a separate problem which I have raised in another topic of this forum. I cannot at present implement the advice received there.

Question: In earlier versions of Outlook Express there were 2 folders recording the mail archives - one with files of type .dbx, the other, of type .mbx. Have I missed a second folder in this version?

I am anxious to edit these archives - exceedingly difficult without their proper structure. I shall be most grateful for help with this problem.

 

Many thanks for your reply, confirming my impression that .mbx files disappeared with OE4. I am especially grateful for the information ehat the folder structure is held in Folders.dbx.

I copied the My E-mails folder from My Documents in Win XP in my PC into the corresponding My Documents in my laptop - after first deleting the one already there.

The Import option from File/Import in OE offers to import a Store directory, but I by-passed that process as above, since the required store directory was in another computer. There was previously a minimal amount of mail in the laptop's mail folder, and I was happy to scrap that - mostly transferred previously to PC.

Perhaps I should explain that I access the Windows System and data files on my PC via Mint Linux, and copy them using a USB Flash Memory stick. The transfer was complete except for the loss of the directory structure. The background to this is that the laptop is the only machine on which I can at present run Windows. There's a good deal of hardware assembly to be done to get another machine going, with perhaps some new components, and I'm short of time.

Now I have checked in my PC that Folders.dbx exists in the file My E-mails which I copied into my laptop - it is 11 MB, and as I said did not show folders there. In my laptop, there have been many changes since I imported the archive - a good deal of editing, removing some of the original folders, creation of relatively few new folders and sub-folders, and quite a lot of new mail. Folders .dbx there is now 328 kB, and My E-mails, which contains it, is 620 MB, 919 files (which of course represent folders in OE).

It is clear that the new folders created in my laptop are showing, but the ones imported are not. It is possible that the current 328 MB represents only the new folders.

If you can suggest an alternative procedure, I can back up the current installation in my laptop and re-install the original archive for easier editing. I shall then need to combine it with new material which will need to be separated out from the current archive.

Again, with many thanks:

 

Thanks again. First, a digression: your third paragraph ends with Code: over a box containing the path to your own Folders.dbx, and a scroll bar. To my amazement, that works! How is such an inclusion achieved? I wonder whether it can be put into an e-mail - I doubt it. Perhaps it could be used in Office or OpenOffice - I would like to know how.

My mail archive represents over 7 years use of the Internet, and most of it comes from 2 active mailing lists which I classified and kept. The archive for one is possibly of some importance as that was on Listserv and our access to that facility was terminated at short notice, losing access to the website archive. We migrated to Googlegroups and I now use that website archive and no longer receive mails.

My e-mails since October 2007 are in Thunderbird, where Local Folders now contains 275 items totalling 129.6 MB.

I can well believe the size of my original Folders.dbx - presumably it has to log the location of each of the other dbx's. What I would like to do is access one copy of My E-mails (originally named Outlook Express, at the end of a similar path to yours), open it and edit out the master files of the mailing lists hoping thus to remove all of their contents - as I could do in Outlook Express itself if I could open it with its original folder structure.

I started on a direct editing process in OE in my laptop, similar to your suggestion, but it's extremely tedious. I have to look at the contents of each folder (1071 of them to begin with) and decide what to do with it. I started sorting the main mailing list into 1-year sections - 2006 is 19 MB - I think that by then I had stopped classifying them. We came off Listserv at the end of March 2007; up to then it was 7.53 MB - consulting my laptop as I write.

Apologies for a long rambling post!