"Frank S" wrote in message
...
Several days ago all of my saved message folders, both In and Sent ,
disappeared from my OUtlook Express. I have no recollection of doing
anything that would have caused this.

I was able to find what appears to be these missing folders by Searching
in
hidden folders for .dbx files .. BUT, I cannot acess them.

Can anyone help me regarding trying to salvage these folders ?

Two things commonly do this:
1) an Anti-virus set to scan email (especially McAfee or Norton), or
2) the user interrupting OE's compacting of messages.

a: Turn off email scanning in your anti-virus.

b: Get DBXpress (www.oehelp.com) to recover messages.

c: Compacting of folders is necessary or they will become corrupted or else
so
large that they can no longer be used. Deleting a message does not reclaim
the space. The message is marked as deleted but is still there until the
folder is compacted. That is why programs such as DBXtract work.

If a user closes compacting while compacting is in progress data loss will
probably occur.

Open OE and close it and let it compact the messages. After doing this it
won't ask again until you have closed OE 100 times.

If you have WinXP SP2 you will want this update:
There are two articles, KB918766 and KB918651, but the latter is not
currently available. The download link is
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

It places the backup in Recycled, overwriting any earlier backup of the
sane folder(s). To use it, copy it to the store folder, delete the one you
want to replace and then rename the BAK file to DBX. (It's a bit more
complicated if the messed up DBX file isn't there or contains messages that
are new that you want to keep.

--
Frank Saunders, MS-MVP OE/WM
http://www.fjsmjs.com
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