Lost emails

CCleaner for Windows
1

This morning, on closing outlook express, it offered to compress files to save space, as it does, and I clicked yes, having done so many times before.

After it had finished, I reopened OE to find every email message in all folders had gone. I had already deleted the recycle bin with CCleaner, so no luck there. I've used a software called "Recovery" by Brian Kato, which found a number of .dbx files, but having restored them to a backup folder, am unable to import them to OE; the message says "no messages were found, or they are in use by another program" (they aren't).

Also tried running a software by Stompsoft to recover email messages; this program is available via a U3 flash drive. It failed to find any messages.

One thing in the "readme" of the "Recovery" program says that recovery of encrypted files on NFTS systems is not supported. Could .dbx files be described as "encrypted" for this purpose? ie is it worthwhile trying CCleaner's "recuva" program for this?

I'm not terribly optimistic. If anyone has any ideas of what to do next that might solve the problem, and or knows why it happened or has heard of it happening before, I'd be fairly interested. Some of those files are important. And of course I hadn't got round to backing them up. And system restore was disabled. I have tried restoring a reg backup, but of course, without the files, no go.

I am not "blaming" CCleaner for this, in case that's how it reads. I think it's something that went a bit nuts in the OE program, but who knows?

Windows XP home, SP2, patched. Athlon 3500+, 2.1GHz, 1G Ram.

Thanks.

2

There was a post a while back here that MAY help, and it mentions recuva

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...;hl=.dbx+emails

3

That was fast. Thanks. Downloading Recuva now.

4

No luck at all with Recuva, just got several thousand results, not displayed, with a "bad allocation" advice.

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=12953

5

Are you sure that those emails are gone from your hard drive? Maybe they just are gone from the OE...?

6

CC, not sure at all. The Outlook express folder, where the message repository is, contains 438mb of .dbx files. I tried to import from there, yet only a handful of messages ended up viewable in the program.

7

A couple of links for you, the first is just info, (but still worth a read)

http://www.insideoe.com/files/store.htm

Not sure how well this will work as I have never used it, but it's free

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/OE_Reader/dbxviewer.html

8
Not sure how well this will work as I have never used it, but it's free

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/OE_Reader/dbxviewer.html

That's a nice little application.

9

Thanks for the replies, but I think I'm coozed. Tried the applications recommended, and a couple of others, no luck.

There's also some good info Here, which I tried.

The lesson seems clear. And probably obvious to many.

-Backup important files as they become important, routinely.

-Don't let the folders in OE get too large. Clean 'em out, regularly. I think this is why mine became corrupted.

-If they do become corrupted, don't d*** around with them (as I did), try quitting background applications, and have OE compress all folders again. Apparently, this can somehow undo the corruption that occurred in the first place.

10

It's sad that you have had to lose things in order to learn about the problems that can happen with .dbx files.

What you have learnt, and this thread, may help others.

11

I've learned a bit from others bad luck (he said, generously) in the past.

If someone can learn a bit from mine, great.

That's one reason (apart from courtesy) that it's good to post follow-up to problems, whether solved or not. (Nudge nudge wink wink hint hint..)

Thanks again.