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[amyc]

Hello, hope you can shed some light as am tearing my hair out.

For the second time this year Outlook Express has deleted a huge chunk of my messages after asking me to 'compact' them (as it randomly does on occasion). This morning it deleted all recieved between 7th of March and today. Usually when compacting I don't notice a difference but in January it deleted about 5000 from all folders and I am sure it was after asking the same question.

I am going mental as I desperately need those messages and can't find them anywhere. I've done a search, restored everything in the recycle bin and asked another computer savvy friend for help, all to no avail.

Any ideas or assistance and I'd be so grateful.

Thanks and have a good day.

[JonS]

in all probability you've lost them. they're gone, no chance of getting them back

You let the mailbox files get too big, they've crashed (probably the IDX files corrupted) and then autorepaired themselves. During that process part of the data was dumped forever.
I'e been there myself several times and tried it. Those missing mails are almosrt certainly gone

There is one slim chance.
Try this repair tool http://download.cnet.com/Repair-Tool-for-Outlook-Express/3000-2367_4-10387098.html

Just occasionally the dumped data is help in a temporary file in the OE profile folder and SOMETIMES this tool can reintegrate it
However its a very very slim chance. Best to resign yourself to the worst

Moral of the story?
Outlook Express needs regular housekeeping and deletion of old posts to keep it stable.

For future reference, a better solution than using OE is to download either Windows Live Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird. Both are more stable. And if you can set your mail account to use IMAP rather than POP3, so much the better


PS - just checked
the max file size of each OE DBX file is 2GB
i.e. 2GB for Inbox, 2GB for Outbox, etc
It doesn't take long to hit that limit

[zlatan24]

The resolution given trouble may be lost outlook express. The utility uses modern and clear methods of restoring outlook express data. It can work with big invalid dbx files and can save restored info as files not larger 1GB, if larger as some dbx files. The program starts under all major versions of Windows OS.

[JonS]

many years ago I had a free tool to do this, but can I find it now? No chance... All I can find are paid-for versions like the one I listed and zlatan's suggestion