Messages recovery

[adbonn]

Dear All,

About two days ago one of my installed programs (AvirMail - a program to check emails) halted my computer and for some reason about 6 months of email messages were deleted.

I did try a search for modified files, but with no success. It seems that this program corrupted the messages.

Is there a way to recover my messages?

I have a Windows 2000 Professional/Outlook Express.

Any help is appreciated.

REgards

Adrian

 

[PAndersen]

Have you lost all *.DBX files ?

 

[adbonn]

I did a search for them and the Inbox.dbx is still there. The messages deleted were removed only from this folder. I do have other folders, but they remained intact.

Any suggestions?

 

[PAndersen]

You have already searched for files created or modified 2-4 days ago, and you found no inbox.old or similar files which might contain the lost mails (?) - If the existing Inbox.dbx is a relatively large file, you may try to stop the mail programs, temporarily rename the Inbox.dbx to Inbox.txt and open that file in Wordpad to see if there is any lost information which can be saved as text.
If that does not work, you will need a powerful unerase program to search the complete disk for deleted files or even fragments of text (e.g. special names which were parts of lost mails).

 

[Guest_imported]

I have pretty much the same problem like adbonn, but I don't even have any dbx-files (my Win2k broke down one week after the last service, no one could tell me why), and I have installed another Win2k on a new HD, and I've left all files on the other HD. I know that there's a way in Microsoft Outlook, but you don't have those files in Outlook Express. So is there a way to find old Mails if you have absolutely nothing?

 

[joegz]

Without the DBX files there is no chance unless you are willing to shell out some $$$ and take your HD to some data recovery vendor. But even doing that there is no guarantee that they will find the files. joegz
"Sometimes you just need to find out what it's not first to figure out what it is."

 

[msdelight]

I was typing a eply to a letter on hotmail-msn and my AOL connecion was lost when I tried to refresh the page when I connected again it dissappeared...help it was very important, is there any way to find it on my computer.
msdelight

 

[skonecny]

TO - mobo_tweaker: If you have your old hard drive you can try to recover the deleted files see thread605-293032. The files may still reside on the drive so you may want to look for the active files.

TO - adbonn: Either try an unerase utility or take PAndersen's advise. OE does not actually remove any messages until a setting for compacting the .dbx files is triggered.

 

[adbonn]

Thanks to all for the help.

Regards

Adrian

 

[Guest_imported]

Abdonn,
I've experienced this same problem, and it's not really anything wrong with Outlook Express. it's the email checking program you installed. The problem is that it is still checking the emails as OE tries to compress them for archive in "inbox.dbx" so the index of that file gets corrupted, which results in your loss of email in Outlook express, but no change in the file itself. Yo can view the inbox in a text editor, but beware. If you received any attachments, they'll be encoded so they'll show up as garbage, but the text of your emails will be there. I have yet to find a way to restore the index of "inbox.dbx", but when I do I'll try to post it here.

 

[mnk786]

To sconecny

Could you please tell me about which unerase software or utilities (you suggested to adbonn) are available to recover the messages from the Outlook Express. Thanks.

 

[Kento]

mnk786, data recovery programs can't restore deleted emails. But DBXtract (free) can extract them from your dbx files if and only if the deleted emails are still present in one of those dbx files. It's the only program I know of that can do it but there might be some others.

http://chattanooga.net/~scochran/DBXtract.htm

If you want a good data recovery program then get Drive Rescue which is completely free and has no spyware. But as I said, it cannot recover deleted emails. DBXtract would be your only hope for recovering them.

http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue/

Here's some directions for using DR to recover deleted files:

1. Install it then click on Drive Rescue in the start menu. When the screen pops up click on the life preserver icon to open the program.

2. Click the button next to 'recover deleted files'.

3. Under the Logical Drive tab click on your C drive to highlight it then click ok.

4. When the screen opens the Deleted section in the left pane should already be expanded.

5. Scroll down and click on the folder you deleted the files from.

6. In the right pane, all the files with green icons were deleted. Find the one you want to recover (if it's there) and right click on it and select 'save to'. Then browse to and select the folder you want to save it to and click ok. Do that for all the files you want to recover then exit the program.