Emails lost from OE

[Tarq57]

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.

[Mornington Crescent]

Tarq,

Have you tried in OE.

View/Current view/ show all messages. It has solved the problem for me in the past.

MC

[Saab Dastard]

Are all your folders still present when you open OE?

If so, what file sizes are they in Win Explorer? A genuinely empty folder has a file size of 10KB. Any larger means that it contains emails.

SD

[Tarq57]

MC, thanks, but they are already set that way. Tried cycling thru, no luck.

SD, OE opened like a virgin install, all added subfolders etc were gone. There are 438 Mb of messages/.dbx files in the message repository, so I got the program to import from there. That restored most of the subfolders/new folders I had created, but only a handful of messages, ended up viewable, mostly from the day the thing happened. I am at a loss to know what is causing the folder to occupy so much space yet be able to import so few messages.

[The Flying Pram]

Tarq57, This got me wondering how Thunderbird works, so I looked at some of the help pages. One thing which just might be of relevance is that compressing folders or even deleting them doesn't get rid of them, they just get bigger until the program starts struggling. Compacting them however does. According to Mozilla most Email programs do this automatically, wheras with Thunderbird you have to do it manually, or select it to automatic from the Options menu. I followed their instructions to open folders into Notepad and found large amounts of random letters/numbers in between some readable messages.
I know this won't help your situation, but it might shed some light on goings on behind the scenes.
Regards.

[Tarq57]

Thanks for the replies. Think I'm coozed.
If this happens to anyone else, there's some good info here about it:
MS file corruption (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/columns/filecorruption.mspx)
I suspect that since some of my folders were so large/overdue for a cleanup that the compression corrupted them. Tried a couple of tools that claim to sometimes be able to restore corrupted .dbx files, but no luck. I think I dicked around with the files too much first. (Moving 'em, making backups, attempting to open in notepad etc.)
The lesson is clear.
Delete unwanted files, and empty deleted folder routinely, so they don't get too large.
Backup important files as they become important.
And if this happens, shut down background applications, and have OE compress all folders again.

[Saab Dastard]

Good advice there - I would add that one should limit the number of messages in folders - especially the inbox.

I have 74 folders in total - I archive at the end of every year, plus I have a folder structure for various interests and hobbies - e.g. PPRuNe, flying, Porsche 928, games, ebay etc.

The largest number of messages in any one folder is about 7000.

Take the opportunity to back up the *.dbx files from time to time! Preferably before running the compactor. :O

SD