[Outlook Experess: Mail lost after compacting]

A friend got the common message "You outta compress your mail folders to save space! "

He hit 'OK' and it started. Then his wife said, "Hey, we're gonna be late for (something or other)! ", so he shut down his XPP machine and lit out.

When he returned home, he restarted his pc and the compression resumed.

(Note, I'm just relaying what he told me on the phone - I don't have more details)

But, alas, when he opened his Outlook Express 'Sent' folder, everything later than August 2007 has disappeared.

Anyone know if a file recovery app would work? Or is there some other way of retrieving those lost Sents?

 

Outlook Express stores email in .dbx files.
They are easier to work with than the .pst file for Outlook.
You should be able to locate them all by searching for *.dbx

I would first find them, and copy them to a different locaton.

There is a Outlook Express tool which might be useful for this (or is it for Windows Mail...It's been so long since I used it).

I will see if I can dig it up and check it's features.
I'll let you know something by Monday.

But you definately want to pull a copy of the files.

 

Bilbo, thanks. Yes, I know about backing up the dbx folder - what I want to do is recover, if possible, his lost sents.

Cheers.

 

Bilbo and PeteC: Thanks for the tips guys. I'll check out the DBExtract app (apparently there's a big brother called DBExpress) and see if it's suitable.

GetData makes a mail recovery prog - that might be OK. Not cheap though.

PeteC's comment about the .bak is interesting. If the process automatically creates a backup of each and every dbx folder before compressing, it should only be a matter of locating the right one. But if the process locates these .baks in the Recycle Bin......well, I've looked in a lot of Recycle Bins over the years and I can't recall ever seeing any dbx backups. Maybe they get put in the recycler area, eg, the System Restore archive.

Oh....just recalled that my friend said he'd done a system restore as soon as he realised what had happened (which as we know doesn't work for mail and docs) so maybe I'll need to reverse that before I do anything else.

 

Well, I'll be durned. Just looked in my laptop's RC bin and there's a whole bunch of dbx bak files. So I guess my OE recently did the compression thing.

Well, that's cool. Another day when I learnt something new

OK. In terms of my pal's PC then, it seems likely that his RC bin might possibly contain a Sent Items folder, in the shape of a Sent Items.bak. I guess that if this is so, and the bin's sent.dbx is bigger than the Sent folder in OE, then it's only a matter of replacing one with the other, according to the instruction you posted earlier.

Thanks again PeteC

 

Just rang the guy and he tells me he has a bunch of baks in his RC bin, but none of 'em are 'Sent Items'.

So all I can do is run a few file recovery apps and see what falls out.

Cheers all