I backed up my email files before I reformatted my computer and now I have a cd full of .mbx and .ibx files But for some reason I cannot get them to import into Outlook Express which seems to use .dbx files now. I swear I had Outlook Express 5 before but now it uses differnt file extensions. Someone please tell me I havn't lost all my email. I don't even need them in the program, I just need some way to read them, even as text files.

G'day Rust, have you tried to open them in Wordpad, I just opened mine and could read the text from emails clearly but interspersed with some of the code stuff. When I installed IE5 I still had IE4 and used the compatability install giving me the browsers for IE3,4 and 5 [all at once if I choose]. It also converted OE4 's mail to OE5 and I can read old mail from OE4 but with OE5's interface. It left the .mbx and .idx files intact, probably in case I uninstall IE5/OE5.

I know this won't help now, but I have had several machines with OE (W95 & W98) and if I backed up the approriate .dbx files my messages all came back fine, just as I had last seen them, once I had copied them in place of the new empty ones. If you need to do same trick again just shove your e-mail into the delete box, then you will only have to copy back Deleted Items.dbx

I know you swear you had OE 5 but those extensions .ibx and .mbx are oe 4's format try doing the import this way file -> import -> messages then choose oe4 as the imort type and point away should be good to go