Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Outlook Express 6

May 19, 2005 1:42AM PDT

I just tried to use Outlook Express to download my messages from my E-Mail accounts. There are 2 accounts, my ISP and Hotmail. It downloaded both just fine and I can read the mail in both. However, when I try to delete the E-Mail in the Inbox for my ISP, Outlook Express crashes. The Hotmail account works just fine. So it appears not to be Outlook itself but something with the Inbox on my ISP's account. BTW, I tried deleting files from other folders in my ISP's account and they delete properly. Obviously something is messed up with the Inbox. I used Explorer to find where Outlook Express stores the folders and found them and the Inbox for my ISP is at 5.9 megs. I read where Outlook Express had a problem with folders that were large. Could this be the problem? Is there any way to work around it? I was thinking about exporting the messages individually, at least from the inbox folder, and then restoring the ISP account and bringing back the messages one by one into various folders to keep the size down. Does this sound feasible?

I was going to try to export the messages to another folder but the Export function does not work unless I open Outlook or Exchange, make it the default mail program, and export to it. There was a message a long time ago that gave a procedure for exporting Outlook messages to a csv or comma delimited file but can't find it right now. Does anyone remember this procedure? Any hopes that it will fix the problem. I was going to export the folders and reestablish the account for my ISP. Anyone have any ideas?

I know I have lots of questions here but bear with me. TIA,
John

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Re: Outlook Express Inbox
May 19, 2005 4:57AM PDT

Try
- Moving (drag and drop) the messages from the inbox to any other folder. Of course, a move is an implicit delete so this might not work.
- In stead of move: copy them (drag and drop with control pressed). I suppose this works, which saves your messages.

Then go into Windows, find the file Inbox.dbx (that's the Outlook Express inbox and delete it. Outlook Express will create a new undamaged EMPTY inbox if you run it again.
Now you can move back your messages to the inbox, if you like, or leave them in the other folder where you copied them to.

I'm sure 5.7 Mb is not too big for Outlook Express. My largest file is 26 Mb, without any problems.

Don't forget to compress your OE folders occasionally; File>Compress>Compress all folders. This makes them smaller by 'filling the holes' that come if you delete mail from them.

Hope this helps.


Kees

- Collapse -
Re: Outlook Express Inbox
May 31, 2005 6:04AM PDT

Kees,
I tried your suggestion out and quickly found out that while I could copy the inbox messages to another newly created folder, they could not be deleted in that folder either. What I eventually would up doing was to create a file for each message in a new folder outside of Outlook. Basically, I selected all the text and pasted it into a file. This took some time as I had to come up with a method to account for any attachments the message contained. When I got the last message copied, I then found the inbox.dbx and deleted it as you suggested. So Outlook is working again, but exactly what caused the problem with deletions is anybody's guess. Again, thanks for your help.
John