My mother-in-law uses OE6 for her email. She accidentally deleted an email message. She has already closed and restarted OE6 and since the OE6 options are set to "Empty messages from the 'Deleted Items' folder on exit," the message, of course, no longer shows up now when I look in the 'Deleted Items' folder using OE6. (I am accessing her PC remotely from my PC).
The .dbx folders were last compacted 2 weeks ago so I know the message is still in either (or both) the Inbox.dbx (198MB) or Deleted Items.dbx (9MB) file(s), but probably just flagged as deleted.
I uploaded both .dbx files (before too many more changes occurred in them) to my PC and put them in a temporary work folder. I tried to use Recuva but I can't get it to recognize the .dbx file in the work folder. It says there is nothing to recover.
Since the .dbx files were not deleted at the file level and are not corrupted in any way, should Recuva be able to find individual email messages inside a .dbx file and recover them? Or, is that not a function of Recuva?
Run Recuva in normal scan, switch to Advanced mode if you have run the Wizard, select Emails in the Filename or Path box at the top r/h. Do you see a file called Outlook Express emails.zip? If so recover this to some folder, open it and see what's inside.
Yeah, there were 26 files inside the zip and the one email message I am looking for was in there. Unfortunately, the message (and the 4 attached photos) were already corrupted. Guess I didn't get to the dbx file soon enough before the contents were partially overwritten.
Earlier this afternoon, before reading your reply, I found and downloaded Smart Email Recovery (free download from cnet) and tried it. It had given me virtually the same result as Recuva did, right down to which characters in the text of the email message body were unrecoverable. It couldn't recover the 4 attached photos either.
We were able to get the sender to just re-send the email with the photos attached. It's all good.
Thanks for your reply.
Happy Holidays!
EDIT: This problem is a great illustration of why I have always hated the .dbx file structure of Outlook Express and the .pst file structure of Outlook. I have upgraded to Windows Live Mail where each message is stored in it's own .eml file, thus, avoiding this type of recovery problem. (I backup my email store folders multiple times every day so that if I delete a message by mistake, I'll have a much better chance of recovery).