Outlook Express Mail Tree Structure

Appreciate some assistance.

Have a situation where The Outlook Express Folders.dbx may need to be deleted.

Found some guidance at the Tomsterdam website, and it goes as follows:

'If the Folders.dbx becomes corrupt, OE often stops displaying folders for existing *.dbx files, and sometimes will simply refuse to start. Also a bloated Folders.dbx can make OE run very slowly. Both problems can be repaired by closing OE and deleting Folders.dbx. Understand though that you will lose the mail tree structure, all lists of newsgroups, and all synchronization options, and that message rules will likely need to be edited'

What exactly is the Mail Tree Structure?

If the Mai Tree Structure is lost, how is it reconstructed?

Thanks for the help.

 

The mail tree structure is the folder list you see in the left pane of OE. If you lose the tree structure you will lose any folders that you've created in OE. You won't, however, lose the emails. The first time you open OE after you delete the folders.dbx all of your emails will be in the inbox. To create the tree structure again you need to recreate any folders you had before and then move your emails back into the desired folders. If you haven't created any folders of your own things will be pretty much the same. You might want to just move the folders.dbx and see if it takes care of your problem. If not, you can just move it back and save yourself the trouble of having to rebuild it.

 

Actually, the folders will all still be there, even the ones you have created. All the contents will also still be inside them. The only changes will be that the "Structure" of the hierarchy tree will have changed for any that you created, eg., if you created a sub-folder of the Inbox folder and named it Saved Mail, it would appear when you clicked the + sign of the Inbox folder. After deleting the Folders.dbx file however, it would appear as a main folder without any parent folder.

It's easy to put it back, just drag it to the Inbox folder and drop it there.

 

Thanks for the correction Zephyr. It's been a while since I've done it. Guess I remembered wrong. What can I say?

 

I'd say you're doing just fine! You had it pretty well nailed it's truly a no harm thing to try, especially if you use the recycle bin. Any mis-step is easily remedied that way without having to know any hot licks.

Best regards.

 

Thanks much for the info.

Helping out a friend with some email issues.

The Mail tree has the folders that you normally see associated with OE (Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, etc., and then it also has a folder where the web based email is received and another set of Inbox, Sent Items, etc. under this. (MSN Explorer 7 uses web based email (actually Hotmail), but it can be read in Outlook Express)

Would like to trim this down so that you only display the web based email and its set of folders.

Any ideas of how this is done?