Emails vanishing from Outlook Express

[Centaurus]

I have Windows 10 and use Outlook Express for emails. I save certain emails in folders by month. For example my folders are named January 2012, March 2015 April 2019 and so on. Some folders might be named such as All Flight Safety Articles or whatever. After reading incoming emails I slide those I want to keep in their respective folder of which I have a list of 60 folders. Recently I selected folder January 2012 to read an old email. The moment I clicked to open that folder all the emails there flashed on for less than a second then vanished with a one line mesage saying "nothing to see here" or similar.

I then did the same to several other old folders and the same thing happened to them too. ie a momentary flash of the emails in the folder then they instantly vanish. I have now lost ten folders all more than five years old. I Googled the problem which suggested several ways of retrieving these lost folders. Unfortunately it all got a bit complicated for me because I am not a computer expert. Many of the missing emails were of real personal value to me. Someone told me that the contents of the folders must be in my computer somewhere. May be or maybe not. Appreciate any advice on how to retrieve the missing emails

[netstruggler]

Originally Posted by Centaurus

I have Windows 10 and use Outlook Express for emails. I save certain emails in folders by month. For example my folders are named January 2012, March 2015 April 2019 and so on. Some folders might be named such as All Flight Safety Articles or whatever. After reading incoming emails I slide those I want to keep in their respective folder of which I have a list of 60 folders. Recently I selected folder January 2012 to read an old email. The moment I clicked to open that folder all the emails there flashed on for less than a second then vanished with a one line mesage saying "nothing to see here" or similar.

I then did the same to several other old folders and the same thing happened to them too. ie a momentary flash of the emails in the folder then they instantly vanish. I have now lost ten folders all more than five years old. I Googled the problem which suggested several ways of retrieving these lost folders. Unfortunately it all got a bit complicated for me because I am not a computer expert. Many of the missing emails were of real personal value to me. Someone told me that the contents of the folders must be in my computer somewhere. May be or maybe not. Appreciate any advice on how to retrieve the missing emails

Outlook Express is really old. Support for it was discontinued in 2006.


What type of email account are you using it with? ie is it an online account or one with your internet provider, or something else?

[Jhieminga]

A few things to consider (apart from the age of the software as mentioned above):
- How did you set up the account in OE? As a POP3 account or IMAP? That determines if we're looking at a mirrored situation on a server and your system, or whether the e-mails just exist(ed) on your system.
- Did you check any 'view' settings? Is OE only showing newer e-mails, messages from the current year or something like that? It has been a while since I worked with OE, but perhaps a setting under 'view' or some sort of filter is set incorrectly for your purposes.
- Your messages are stored in a .dbx file somewhere in a folder. The location of that folder is either

C:\Windows\Application Data\Outlook Express\{GUID}

or

C:\Documents and Settings\<User>\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

depending on your Windows version. You can also click on Tools > Options > Maintenance > Store folder to find out where your storage folder is located.

Don't do anything to this folder! You may want to consider creating a backup copy in a safe location, but remember that you need to enable 'show hidden files' to be sure that you're copying everything.

{GUID} refers to a unique identifier consisting of letters and or digits. There may be more than one present. If so, you may have set up different 'identities' by accident or by design at some point.

There is a discussion about restoring folders based on backup files here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...7-1c22a4e0f18d
Check if there is anything in your recycle bin or somewhere in the store folder that could be useful (see explanation in that link).

Last but not least: please switch to a supported e-mail client ASAP!

[Centaurus]

Netstruggler and Jhieming. Thank you both very much indeed for your replies to my query. I have passed your advice on to a friend who is a computer professional and hopefully she will sort out for me the mystery of the missing emails. .

[DaveReidUK]

Until recently I ran OE (aka Windows Mail) on a Windows 7 box to service a couple of email accounts, using POP3.

If it's any help, stored emails are stored individually, as .eml files, in \Users\XXXX\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail

I would start by looking there. As noted above, if you are using IMAP then all bets are probably off.

[Thirsty]

I would be checking the account settings, especially in respect of archiving, and retention.