For years, I’ve been a fan of Tom Koch’s Inside Outlook Express page. Although I don’t use Outlook Express, just about everyone I know does, and this site has answers to questions you probably didn’t even know to ask!
Case in point: A friend called a few days ago. He’d been trying to move his wife’s e-mail messages and address book to a new computer, and he was getting a baffling series of error messages. We walked through the usual troubleshooting steps, and he was able to set up Outlook Express so that her email account worked just fine with a clean set of OE folders.
But… as soon as he restored her backed-up messages, everything went kerblooey. Trying to start Outlook Express produced nothing but a mystifying error message. After a little more experimentation, we determined that one of the e-mail folders was corrupted.
That’s when I decided to check Tom’s site. There I found a pointer to Steve Cochran’s OEHelp site and a marvelous free utility called DBXtract. I’ve recommended DBXtract for years, but I hadn’t seen it lately. It works directly with the DBX files that store Outlook Express error messages, allowing you to recover the saved messages when Outlook Express can’t.
If you’re having a problem with Outlook Express, check out Tom’s site. He’s spent a tremendous amount of time on it in the past year, and the effort shows. In fact, when I have OE questions, I recommend you skip Microsoft’s Knowledge Base and start with Inside Outlook Express instead. If you can’t find the answer here, maybe it doesn’t exist.