OE6 Message Compacting

[audiopro]

A client reports he has received this message.

To free up disk space, Outlook Express can compact messages. This may take up to a few minutes.

He has clicked OK and all his emails have disappeared.
The older messages were in his Recycle Bin which he has restored but the more recent messages are still missing.
After a bit of Googling around it appeared that Import was the way to go.
He tried:-
Import Mail from OE6 Identity but gets the error

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

Then he tried:-
Import mail from an OE6 store directory but the target field is blank and doesn't know where to look for the backed up file.

Could someone please give us a clue regarding what to do to get the compacted emails back into his Inbox.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[smah]

First & formost, be very careful from here and don't mess around without a backup. Immediately make copies of all the *.dbx files on the machine. These are in hidden directories (one set for each windows user). The OE mail store is a rather delicate database system and sometimes things go wrong with it. Often when something goes wrong like this it's because of some interaction between a third party security tool (antivirus, antispam, etc) when database functions are occurring (like compacting). There's a high likelyhood that the messages are still in the database, but the indexing has been lost.

Read this related info

http://www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx#4

and if you need to recover the messages, your best chances are with the DBXpress utility listed on that page. In all honesty, if the messages are important, don't mess around with anything else looking for something cheaper. It's worth the money if you want the messages.