On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:10:02 -0700, jason wrote:

There have been a lot of threads regarding the flaw in OE6 that causes entire
folders to be lost if you interrupt the compacting process. Unfortunately,
OE6 gives you the option to "Cancel" the compacting process at any time
without warning you that anything will occur as a result of your doing so.
This is a serious design flaw that has not been remedied by Microsoft.

Actually, it may have been. I am not able to test Windows Live Mail
Desktop, or whatever they are calling the next level email client.
Strictly speaking, it isn't a "replacement" for MSOE because it won't
run on older computers. It reportedly has fixed whatever is wrong with
the .dbx format which lends itself to corruption. OTOH, I have never had
my files corrupted in MSOE.

However, I know almost a dozen persons who have tried the recovery program
DBXpress with no measurable success. I note that it is recommended by most
techs in this newsgroup on a regular basis including by the person who
designed the program. But this program is equally flawed. The chances are
very good that you will not "extract from file," which is the only option
that will allow you to filter or specify what folders you want to recover
from.

The measure of success of the program really depends upon what remains
of the data in the disk clusters. When the pointers in the database are
corrupt, finding the missing pieces is next to impossible. I seem to
recall that there is always the caveat given with the recommendation.
DBXpress is a _last resort_ measure, after all else has failed, and
there is no guaranty that the results will be as desired.

If you are forced to "extract from drive," you must have a 2nd hard drive
available to avoid corruption and over-writing and you will be unable to
specify the folders you want. This means you will get every message you
already have as well as deleted messages with little chance at that point of
recovering any of your lost messages. This can be an organizational nightmare
and none of this is openly disclosed before you purchase the program.

Never having used the program, I can't address the specifics. However,
having worked on the lowest level of data written to hard drives, I know
that "missing" data is often present in unused disk clusters. However,
to avoid overwriting unused clusters, you must not access the disk in
any manner which will result in the disk controller assigning an unused
cluster to a new file. The whole point of marking clusters as unused is
to make them available for reuse.

Mucking around with data at the lowest level of disk access is always
risky. Every application that I have used which gives this kind of
low-level access to the data on the disk warns about the hazards of
writing to the disk at this level.

You should take these things into serious consideration before purchasing
DBXpress.

You should take into consideration that _any_ application which access
the disk _outside_ of the file access control system, be it FAT, FAT32,
NTFS, or something else, is risky, and won't always provide the desired
outcome.

--
Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum