DBXpress might have servered you better. It will read the contents of the
hard drive and search for those lost messages. DBXTract will only extract
and recover from existing DBX files that haven't been compacted or corrupted
enough to be unreadable. It's the nature of the DBX file structure.

When OE compacts, it creates a DBT file to use in the process of copying the
available messages to a new file thus removing the old messages. If you
still have the DBT file, copy it to another folder, rename it to .DBX
instead then run DBXTract. If no DBT file, DBXPress will hunt them if they
haven't been overwritten. It works quite well as I've had to use it to
recover messages on the wife's computer before they could get backed up.



"David Smith" wrote in message
...
Hi Folks,

My system crashed while it was compacting messages in Outlook Express 6.
System is XP SP2. Purchased and tried running DBXtract from the
OEHelp.com
website with no success. When file compacting does OE write the
originals to the disk anywhere? The .dbx files still have their original
size but the is nothing in them and compacting shinks them Any
suggestions?

Thanks for any help....


David S