Repairing and recovering damaged dbx folders in Outlook Express My system: Windows XP Outlook Express 6 But I did the same process in Windows 2000 and Outlook Express 5.5 I have a very, very large email system. My OE consists of about 150 dbx folders, totalling 1.3 GB. Problem: When your system crashes, due to a corrupt Administrator profile, or other general screw up, it can sometimes corrupt the .dbx files in your OE. Symptoms: In OE you click on one of your email folders that you know used to have real emails inside of it, and now it is empty. Let's say the bad email folder is called Myjunkandstuff You then go to: C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{1234etc}\Microsoft\Outlook Express here there should be a folder called Myjunkandstuff.dbx BUT instead you find a folder called something like MYJUNK~1.dbx Basically....any dbx folder that has a squigly tilde symbol ~ in the filename and is in ALL CAPS...that means it has been corrupted. Things that can cause this corruption are: Corrupt Profile, general Windows crashes, and bad naming of the folders: If you name a folder with symbols at the beginning, or improper symbols, or ones that are really long. This is bad: Vacation&Fun Plans Workrelatedemailsfromtheremoteofficelastyear ___-CoolEmails ---z--My Emails Fun/Interesting Stuff OE will let you create these folder names, however I have found that Windows will later not understand the symbols in the dbx folder name, and will thus rename them. For example, the folders above would likely NOT be renamed inside of Outlook Express. They would appear to have their normal name. However, when you browse inside of C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{1234etc}\Microsoft\Outlook Express they will have been renamed to something like: VACATA~1.dbx WORKRE~1.dbx ___-C~1.dbx ---Z--~1.dbx FUNINT~1.dbx For some strange reason, Windows also seems to make the corrupted names in ALL CAPS too. And also will use exactly 8 letters in the name. Inside of your OE, when you click on one of these folders, it looks empty, and has no emails in it. Thus, you would assume that the size of the .dbx would be the normal small default size of 50-70k. But when you go into: C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{1234etc}\Microsoft\Outlook Express And do a Detailed view, you can see that your .dbx folders are their normal size. So how do I fix it !!! 1. close OE and any OE related programs 2. go down to the above mentioned subfolder 3. find the corrupted folder, for example: VACATA~1.dbx and check to see if it is bigger than the normal default size of 50-70k, if yes, then there is a good chance we can recover it. 4. open up your OE, create a new folder, or subfolder; you can put it wherever you want; call it: VACATA~1 then click on the folder, obviously there should be no emails in there. Close down OE. 5. go to : C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{1234etc}\Microsoft\Outlook Express or whatever you default location is. You now should have 2 files in there called: VACATA~1.dbx (about 50-70k in size) and VACATA~1 (1).dbx (size would be whatever it was along time ago, could be 200k could be 50 MB, whatever it was originally) 6. Pay attention, this is tricky. Delete the new, small file of VACATA~1 (1).dbx Now, rename the old, big file from its old name (VACATA~1.dbx) to VACATA~1 (1).dbx I do this by doing right click Rename, the copy/paste the name, then delete the new file, then do a rename on the old file. Basically we are tricking Windows and OE into looking at the old big dbx file for the data of that new folder we created. 7. Open up OE, and click on that new folder we created. You should now see all your old emails !! 8. If your folder is named something unstable like: Vacation&Fun Plans Workrelatedemailsfromtheremoteofficelastyear ___-CoolEmails ---z--My Emails Fun/Interesting Stuff then I would consider renaming it now. Rename it to something short, simple, and w/o symbols at the beginning. 9. Close OE. 10. Backup everything. Save early, save often. !!! Other good Outlook Express tips I've discovered: 1. Outlook Express does not seem to like email folders that have many hundreds of emails in one folder. If you have a folder, (especially your big Sent Items folder) and it has more than 500 emails in it, then I would recommend creating a second or third subfolder, and transferring some of those emails to it. 2. If you are in MS Outlook, and then want to Import your Settings, Mail, and Address Book from Outlook Express; and you also have alot (i.e. 500 MB+) of emails, I would NOT do it. I tried it on my system, 1.2 GB of emails, and it crashed MS Outlook permanently. If you really must do it; then backup all your OE dbx files, then open OE, delete half of them (or more). Then close OE, then open MS Outlook and attempt the import. Repeat process for the dbx s deleted. 3. The cool little backup program called Express Assist, http://www.ajsystems.com/oexhome.html , did not help me much. It (at least the versions from about 9 months ago), could not handle very large size email systems. It would backup some of my folders, and then would 'appear' to backup the others also. However, when I went back and tried to restore all of my folders, I found that half of them had their To From Subject, but the bodies were gone :-( If anybody knows if they have fixed that problem, or if there is another very good Outlook Express 6 backup program, post it as a reply to this post :-) Keywords: scotte Outlook Express 6 Windows XP dbx .dbx corrupt empty corrupt profile Administrator profile corrupt Hope this helps at least one person :-) scotte __________