I just had a system crash. When I restarted I found that all the emails in my Inbox have disappeared. Those include sales and negotiation emails which are of vital importance. Added to that there was a lot of material that has been sent to me and now I have no trace of it let alone the contact details of people who have written to me in the last 24 hours.

I’m sure you get the picture. Before I jump of the nearest bridge is there anyway of finding them or are they gone forever?

Hey David, What email client do you use? Is it Outlook Express? if so...

From the Outlook Express menu select Tools | Options | Maintenance and click the StoreFolder button. You see a dialog with the name of the directory that has your mail files. Look in that directory, are there files named after your mail folders and news groups? They would have a .DBX suffix. Outlook Express keeps all messages in these database files.

Yes I use Outlook Express.

I can see two files for the Inbox – one is Inbox.dbt and the other is Inbox.dbx.

The file sizes are respectively 762,939 KB and 825,801 KB so presumably all my emails are there. Yet my Outlook Express Inbox is empty and all my other folders are still available in Outlook Express.

Is there a way to restore them?

Hi,

Are yo sure you haven't archived those emails in any other folders? Have you done a search for a couple of them by subject?

What sort of PC crash did you have? was Outlook running at the time you had system failure?

Cheers

David

Try this.

To import restored e-mail in Outlook Express 6.0

Open Outlook Express 6.0.
On the File menu, click Import, and then click Messages…
In Select Program, select the mail program in which the original files were created.
In Specify Location, click Import mail from an OE 6 store directory.
In Location, click the Browse button, and then browse to the folder where you restored your files.

In Select Folders, select one or more mail folders that you would like to restore. In your case inbox.dbx
Click Finish to exit the Wizard.

I followed what you said.

This is the folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\TRU\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{12BAE732-38E8-4636-B850-3F17AF0AD1DD}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

Once I selected the final folder the wizard would not allow me to go any further. It came up with this message:

The specified message store could not be opened. It may be in use by Outlook Express.

If I was to copy the file into another Folder would that enable me to get around it?

(I never got email notification of the two replies to my last message. I only found the replies by coming to look at the thread.)

Originally Posted by D-A-L

What sort of PC crash did you have? was Outlook running at the time you had system failure?
David

Everything locked up and even Ctrl + Alt + Del would not work so I had to cut off the power. Outlook Express was running at the time and I was checking for messages when everything locked up.

Yes you could try copying it to another location. Make sure OE is closed first before you copy it, open oe again and run the wizard again. If that works you may want to periodically copy the dbx to a secure location as a permanent backup.

Originally Posted by Tassie Devil

Yes you could try copying it to another location. Make sure OE is closed first before you copy it, open oe again and run the wizard again. If that works you may want to periodically copy the dbx to a secure location as a permanent backup.

That won't work. I got this message:

No messages can be found in the folder or another application is running that has the required files open. Please select another folder or try closing applications that may have files open.

I tried changing the name and I closed down as well but it still did not work.

I tried renaming the file so that it would come up in Outlook Express but that didn't work either.

Who looks after your email? Contact them first and ask if they have a copy of all your email on their server.