Outlook Express: compacting messages

but I don't really know what "compacting" messages does. I don't want to do it if I'm going to lose all my messages.

thanks
jesse

The guy was asking a simple question and you gave a smart *** answer each time. I had the same question, you dope. We weren't wondering if it was DELETING it, we were wondering that if it compacted it, if it would be in a sense "zipped" into one file and unable to view any of the messages in were in that compression. So Bonehead, get off your high horse and if you're going to respond to people's legitimate questions in forums, be kind to those who are unfamiliar with the information. After all, that's why they're posting.

If you feel you can put better answers in the forum, I invite to join in.

Bob

I have been thinking about this for a long time. So today I found some information I think is very helpful for all concerned. The link is: http://www.thundercloud.net/infoave/tips/compacting.

There are a few others but I found the most helpful.

I've got the same concerns regarding what ''Clean Up'' actually does...

From the referenced article:

''Click Clean Up Now. You can use the Local File Clean Up dialog box to manually clean up the messages that are stored locally on the computer. This does not delete messages on the server.''

ALL my email is downloaded locally and archived into a system of folders (and that archive is critical to me). In that process deletes the original files from my email server. and NO... I don't want to leave the files on the server.

So..... according to the Microsoft article

''Clean Up'', while not doing anything to the email on my mail server (mail which has already been deleted in the download to my computer process) WILL delete what it thinks are old files from my archive...

RIGHT?????

if so, how do I turn off ''Clean Up'' once and for all to protect my archives???

Thanx!!
jgates

My e-mail compacted the other day, However, now many of my older e-mail that I had stored is now gone and I can't find the old messages. Any help would be very appriciated. I don't know what the issue is.

Thank you,

Paul

I am so glad you asked this question, I tend to have too much email and I do not want to delete it all, but if it is compacted how does it become uncompacted?
Where is it stored?
I had this happen to me when I had Windows 98 SE; it became compacted and I couldn't find it.
I appreciate anything you can tell me to help me with this, thanks, reciter

If anyone can answer this problem, I too hit the "yes" to compact button in error and now have lost the messages. I an find them in a DBX file by searching the computer but need to restore them back into Outlook express as they are links tocontinuing work related e mails.

I have compacted my messages in Outlook Express, received a warning saying'this folder is currently in use by Outlook Express or by another application' and stupidly pressed OK. Now I have lost all my Inbox since Sept 06. Can anyone tell me how to get them back please?

Per a third level at Microsoft, there is no permanent fix. However, start regedit and look for Compact Check Count and delete this. This will work for a while but it will return, supposedly after 99 messages but by my experience this is inaccurate. Regardless, while irritating, this supposedly is the best "fix".

This is a line my daughter put in my backup batchfile that I have run at startup - its all one line!


reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{3228B7EB-E614-4ABE-AD49-AF82F58C2F89}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0" /v "Compact Check Count" /t REG_DWORD /f /d 0

Bob's smart alec response above doesn't help much does it? The other responses, however, demonstrate the spirit of how a forum can run when at its best.

Compacting messages in Outlook Express does make it much more difficult for the average user to retrieve the messages and unfortunately, to my knowledge, Microsoft has not really created a viable alternative for this challenge that fits those who are not highly tech savvy.

Not compacting messages, as mentioned elsewhere here, over time makes the program unwieldy and eventually can make the program slow to respond or even in need of being reinstalled.

I've researched this problem pretty extensively and cannot find a viable alternative (in the later version of Outlook Express) other than to back up your messages in another file folder on your computer prior to compacting (see the Tools, Options, Maintenance steps as mentioned in one of the other tips to do this).

Once you've backed your messages up, if you elect to compact messages, and they become inaccessible for you, you'll have another folder (with a location known to you) to draw from to resurrect them. Hopefully someday, Microsoft will find a solution to this dilemma (or make the solution more widely know, if there is one). In the meantime, if anyone has a more complete solution -- I'd love to know the answer to, as this is one of those quirky dilemmas that drives me a bit whacky.

Hope this helps.

I don't know what a tech will think of this but since I have lost many emails I now set up a file in Documents and name it 'incoming emails' and make sub-folders in their for each of my contacts. To do this open your email, go to File (upper left) and click on Save As. But first get your folder made up in your Document file ready to be able to send your incoming mail to your specified folder. I'm 80 yrs and self taught since 7 years but I'm not losing emails now.

God Bless You luminary2000 for your kind reply. It really helps folks like me who know very little about computers. Microsoft are the ones who created this compact message and they should be the ones to solve this problem for everybody....instead of just ignoring all the folks who buy their products....its the only decent thing to do. Bless

When the email in Outlook Express was compacted recently it deleted all the mail in the Sent Folder. How do I get it back? and how can I stop compacting?
Embee

Can anyone help me please ASAP? When compacting occured on Outlook Express 6 emails, I have now lost 2 folders of important emails. In the recycle bin was *.dbx files in the name of the lost emails. I restored them but cannot locate the emails. I'm a beginner with limited knowledge of how to retrieve this stuff. Thanks

I found this on the Microsoft web site and it should answer your questions about recovering compacted messages:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie55.outlookexpress&tid=16aed4de-f2d7-48d6-8db1-50010db6d251&cat=en_US_ccbc2674-89cc-4c47-b5bb-9d5253ee4005&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=&p=1

bprest1, It's under the maintenance tab, uncheck "Compact messages in background", click Apply/OK.

Tufenuf

Thanks for the reply, but it isn't there if you've downloaded Service Pack 2 for XP Home Edition. See this link. The counter has to be set to 0 through the registry, but will pop back up afer the 100th time it closes I believe; didn't re-read it. At that point.

http://www.alegsa.com.ar/Visitas/i45/Stopping%20automatic%20compacting%20when%20closing%20outlook%20express.php

I sent the message to Microsoft since they said it was an issue for Dell since my 20 digit PID has OEM in it. Also notified them of another problem that started after d/l this service pack and made them aware that sometimes they might fix one thing, but mess up something else. Some of my 16-bit MS-DOS programs had stopped working that were previously. There's a fix for this, but it doesn't come from Microsoft.

bprest1

My computer froze during a 'compacting' session which meant I had to shut down and re-boot. The result was I lost all the emails in my Inbox. Does anyone know if there is anyway I can recover these emails?

Richard

Richard, Check out the links below.

http://www.oehelp.com/DBXpress/Default.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/filecorruption.mspx

Tufenuf

I found those lost emails by going to the Store folder but when I try to open them they are in code or gibberish. Why??? Everything was titled correctly. They are dbx and bak.

go to this link and follow the steps

http://email.about.com/od/outlookexpresstroubles/qt/et_compact_oe.htm

There's compacting and there's defragmenting, and that are totally different things.

If you delete a message from an Outlook .dbx file this leaves a "hole" in the file, that isn't reused. Any new message is still added to the end of file. So if you've got a 20 Mb .dbx-file, delete all messages, add one 1 kB message, in effect it consists of a 20 Mb hole followed by a 1 kB message, so the file has grown to 20.001 Mb.
If you compact this, OE writes all active messages to a new file that's without any hole to start with. So this new folder becomes .001 Mb.

Defragging doesn't change anything to the contents of the file. So defragging the 20.001 Mb file leaves it 20.001 Mb. The only difference (and that's really rather unimportant) is that it's consecutive on the disk. No difference at all with defragging, say, a .mp3 file.

The semi-automatic way is equivalent to what OE does when doing a File>Compact. But much more clumsy, of course, so I wouldn't recommend it, if there's such a nice way built into OE.

Manual method #1 is equivalent to semi-auto.

Manual method #2 is without any sense. There's no guarantee that the new copy is less defragmented than the old one. And the contents are exactly the same 20.001 Mb, so it isn't compacted.


It's always advisable to make a backup of the .dbx files before compacting them. It goes without any errors in 99.9% of the cases, but if an error occurs you'll lose a folder, like in several posts above.

Kees