Hello Mark, Sorry to hear of your troubles. After two or three times of OE losing my mail, I gave up on it. It was the best thing I could have done. I ended up using The Bat, partly due to an interface that is quite similar to OE.
I think I was stubborn enough to get zapped three times before giving up. -- Best regards, Bruce Sunday, March 20, 2005, 2:07:55 PM, you wrote: MC> (OR: Cross Linked and Bummed Out) MC> A question for the computer savvy - MC> I have the .DBX files that Outlook Express uses to store messages in a MC> folder called 'mail' in 'my documents' (not the default location.) MC> To my horror, I fired up OE this afternoon and found no mail - everything MC> was gone except for the handful of new messages for the PDML. MC> Looking around - I realized that I had accidentally copied the 'mail' folder MC> into a neighboring folder. Apparently OE made a new 'mail' folder and just MC> started over... MC> So, I copied the contents of the relocated folder back into the 'mail' MC> folder and figured I was good to go - but unfortunately everything was they MC> except my 'inbox'. There was an 'inbox.dbx' file that was huge,but it was MC> not being read. Looking closer, I realized that the 'deleted items' folder, MC> which should of been huge, was pretty small. Everything else seems fine - my MC> 'rules' are intact, the other folders are OK. MC> I found some software that would extract the contents of the OE .dbx mail MC> files. Running it against 'inbox.dbx' showed that the contents of the MC> purpored 'inbox' file were really my deleted files. And the contents of MC> Deleted Items.DBX seems to be just a truncated version of the same file. I MC> ran the utility against all the other folders, but no sign of my inbox MC> stuff. I also ran a utility called WinUndelete which has been a real life MC> saver in the past, when I have accidentally deleted files - and it shows no MC> deleted version of inbox.dbx (or any deleted .dbx files at all...) (This MC> program shows any deleted files that may still be sitting on the disk.) I MC> did a disk check (this is an NTFS disk) and it found no problems. MC> So... I'm guessing that I'm just SOL on this one - and that somehow in MC> accidentally moving the mail folder (which was possibly in use at the time) MC> my inbox.dbx file got cross linked to my deleted items.dbx file. Is that MC> plausible? Anything else I could try? MC> Oddly enough - it's not as catastrophic a lose as it might seem, as I have MC> 'sent items' folder and address book intact - so I've been able to get back MC> to people on the few pending transactions I have. I printed hard copies of MC> any receipts etc just last week to get ready to do taxes, though I lost an MC> handful that just came in these last few days. If there is a way to get some MC> of this back, that would be nice. MC> Any thoughts, or am I toast? MC> - MCC MC> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - MC> Mark Cassino Photography MC> Kalamazoo, MI MC> www.markcassino.com MC> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
