Nice work, Chris.

General precautions for Outlook Express:

Do not archive mail in default OE folders. They will eventually become
corrupt. Create your own user defined folders for storing mail and move your
mail to them. Empty Deleted Items folder regularly. Keep user created
folders under 100MB, and Default folders as empty as is feasible.

After you are done, follow up by compacting your folders manually while
working *offline* and do it often.

Click on Outlook Express at the top of the folder tree so no folders are
open. Then: File | Work Offline (or double click Working Online in the
Status Bar). File | Folder | Compact all folders. Don't touch anything until
the compacting is completed.

Turn off e-mail scanning in your anti-virus program. It is a redundant layer
of protection that eats up CPUs and causes a multitude of problems such as
time-outs and account setting changes. Your up-to-date A/V program will
continue to protect you sufficiently. For more, see:
http://www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx#3

And backup often.

Backup & Resto
http://www.insideoe.com/backup/

This is a great two click program:

Outlook Express Quick Backup (OEQB)
http://www.oehelp.com/OEBackup/Default.aspx
--
Bruce Hagen
MS-MVP Outlook Express
Imperial Beach, CA


"Chris" wrote in message
...
Reading the other posts below was very helpful to me because the same
thing
happened to me yesterday... during compacting all folders my inbox got
corrupted and I lost 6 months worth of messages. I looked in the recycle
bin
and found inbox.bak and restored it. It went to my IE6 store folder which
I
have set to my documents from tools options. In the IE6 store folder I
renamed my corrupted inbox.dbx to old_inbox.dbx and renamed inbox.bak to
inbox.dbx. This solved my problem and all the lost messages appeared up to
the time inbox.bak was made. I then downloaded the latest messages from my
server. I had to delete the file Pop3uidl.dbx so my POP 3 server would
download all my hotmail files again. Later I removed old_inbox.dbx from
the
store folder and put it somewhere else just in case I need to extract some
message from it in the future. Also from now on I will select in
accounts/properties/advanced options to delete messages from server after
7
or 14 days. This will mean that a recent 7 or 14 day back up of messages
will
stay on the server for such emergencies. So if I back up my IE6 store
folder
every week I should be covered.

Kind Regards
Chris

"Oyster" wrote:

Hi Group;
Just happened, I lost all messages in my inbox from mid April '07 to this
morning 11/16/07. Sent items file is still fine. Been having problems
with OE the last few weeks. Sometimes it just stops working or messages
are
temporarily lost. I shut it down and restart the program and the all
come
back. That's not working now. I am running OE6 on a Windows XP-Pro
machine. I have a POP server. Anything else anyone needs to know? let
me
know. Also, recently for the last 2 weeks or so, I have been getting the
notice to compress. I haven't done that yet.

Help.... Please....
Thanks,
Paul