There are times that you may lost a year or more of your email messages from your Outlook Express inbox folder. It can happen without a warning and it actually happened this weekend on my ex GF notebook. There are some articles on Microsoft site that suggest what to do when your inbox folder become corrupted. It suggests to compact the email folder. WARNING: If you don’t want to lost your emails from your inbox forever, I suggest that you do not follow the suggestion from the Microsoft site, DO NOT COMPRESS the folders now.
There are two cases that may cause the disappearance of emails from the inbox folder or what ever email folder you may have in Outlook Express.
1. Deleting the message
When you delete messages let say from your inbox folder, it will disappear from the list, but actually the message is still there. In outlook express, the emails in each folder are stored in a file named folder.dbx. Emails deleted from inbox will still be in the inbox.dbx, but it is tagged as deleted and the content will be changed a little. The deleted messages will still be there until it is compressed/cleaned.
2. Folder.dbx file is corrupted
Some time when you have a bad day, your inbox.dbx may become corrupted. This may happen when the file inbox.dbx becomes too large. If you keep all your emails from the last 10 or 5 years all in the inbox folder, the chance that it become corrupted become higher.
If you experience one of these cases what can you do to get the disappeared messages back?
First, backup the corrupted inbox.dbx by copying it to other folder, so you can always back in time if something unexpected happened during the rescue operation.
1. If you accidentally delete emails from your inbox, you can always find the deleted messages in Deleted Items folder in outlook express. If you accidentally also delete it from Deleted Items, the message is seems to be permanently deleted. As I said before, it is not. It is still in the .dbx file and you just need a tool to recover from it. Tools like Iolo Search and Recover may help. It can recover deleted Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape, Thunderbird, and Eudora e-mail. But it CAN NOT recover the missing emails due to mail folder.dbx corruption. That is why we need to look at other tools.
2. If you don’t know how your last year emails disappeared without track from your inbox, then it may be because the mail folder inbox.dbx becomes corrupted. Fortunately there are tools that can recall the disappeared emails from its hiding place. This can be done only under one condition: You HAVE NOT follow the suggestion on the Microsoft site to compact you email folders since the corruption.
3. This are the steps you can follow
a. Download and install the tools from: http://macallan.club.fr/SETUP/OutLookExpressExtraction.zip
b. Exit from Outlook Express.
c. Copy the corrupted folder inbox.dbx from C:\Documents and Settings\<Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{SOME-GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\ to other folder, let say c:\inbox.dbx
d. Rename the original inbox.dbx in the C:\Documents and Settings\<Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{SOME-GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\ directory to inbox-corrupted.dbx
e. Run the Macallan Outlook Express Extraction from your start menu or from your desktop, open the c:\inbox.dbx file. It will take some times depend on the size of the .dbx file (or the number of emails), be patient.
f. The extracted emails will be listed, now you can choose to extract all emails from menu Extractions. The extracted emails will be saved in directory c:\inbox\. Now open this folder in explorer.
g. Open Outlook express and point to inbox folder which is now empty because we have renamed the original inbox.dbx to inbox-corrupted.dbx
h. Copy all the files except the .log file from within the folder c:\inbox and (drag)paste it in the inbox folder in Outlook Express. Be patient, it will take some times, depends on the number of emails being processed.
i. Now smile, I hope your emails are back by now.
4. Backup your last years emails to other folder than inbox. Create new folder called Inbox2005 and move your emails dated before 2006 to the folder. It will help prevent your inbox folder becomes too large.