Well, Hotmail has decided to be an evil bitch. I logged on from my date’s house last night and what did I see? New messages 14, total messages 14. This is not good. All of my messages were gone!
I got home, opened up Outlook Express, and they were still there; I could read them all. But when I tried to move them to a safer location, it tried to connect to the server (prudently, I had disconnected from the internet at that time).
(Yes, I know Hotmail is an evil unreliable bitch goddess. No further whining about Microsoft products beyond this point, please.)
I know those fuckers are on my computer because I can read them. Is there any setting I can change so that it won’t try to find them on the Hotmail server when it tries to move them?
Failing that, where do email messages live on my hard drive, so I can go in and grab them by hand (or whatever) and move them to a stable location?
Until I figure out how to save these important messages I will not run Outlook Express while connected to the net, for fear of synchronization deleting all of those messages from my mailbox.
Please help! Are these messages really unrecoverable? Should I just give up, write down the important data, and connect and let them go down with the ship?
Do a “Find” on your pc for any files with the extension .dbx That will give you the location of your outlook express folders. You should see a .dbx file for each subfolder you have in your outlook express.
To do this, click on start, to up to find, then files/folders. Select C:, or any other hard drive you have for hte location and put in ‘*.dbx’, without the quotes in the name box.
'Kay, I opened up the .dbx file for my Hotmail inbox in Wordpad, and although it looks skeevy I saved it as a text file elsewhere so at least I’ll have a backup of the content of the messages. Is there any way to save the messages themselves (the messages qua messages, if you will?)
You say you are using Outlook Express. I use this at home. By default it downloads the emails from the server and does not leave a copy on the server, think cut and paste.
If this is how your Outlook Express Account is set up it explains what you saw. All the previous emails had been downloaded, but the new ones hadn’t so were still visible on the server.
When you view your messages via the Hotmail web interface you are looking at messages on the server.
To find out if your account is set up to do this from Tools choose Accounts and then double click on your hotmail account. Under the Advanced Tab there is a delivery section, this is where you tell Outlook to leave a copy of mail on the server.
If this is ticked all your messages should be visible via the web and Microsoft has (probably) messed up. If not then you have been downloading your messages al the time.
If you want to be able to view your message over the web change the settings here.
A .dbx file is a composite file (similar to a zip file) with all your emails from an Outlook folder in (for example inbox.dbx contains al the messages in your inbox)
To see where these are store look under Tools>Options The under the maintenance Tab there is a store folder button, clicking this will tell you where the files are stored.
Outlook should NOT delete any messages just because they are no longer on the server. However if you have important emails I would recommend backing them up anyway.
Copy the .dbx files to a different location (write them to a CD, zip disk etc)
The instructions are for Outlook 5.5.
I hope this helped, if you have any more questions let me know.
If you have a specific message you want to save, select the message in outlook and choose save as from the file menu. This save the messages individually as .eml files(I think, it might be .msg)
I have just checked OE there is an Export messages option under the File menu, but it only exports messages to a Microsfot Exchange server, not a file.
Well, it didn’t work. I was able to save a number of email messages beforehand, as well as the .dbx file (backed -up, as I said). Is there any way I could load the email messages (now stored as .eml files) back into Outlook Express?
While that may be true, from reading the OP I would much rather come to the conclusion that you do not understand how Outlook Express and Hotmail work together.
At any rate. There is a file called Folders.dbx where OE keeps the list of files /folders etc. If you delete or rename that file, OE will reconstruct it. So, if you want to add a DBX file to your OE, you can just copy it to the folder, delete Folders.dbx and restart OE. The new folder should now appear in the tree. You might want to try to make a copy of the Hotmail-Inbox.dbx file calling it something else and see if OE will recognise it after you delete the folders.dbx file
"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. If you look in that directory you find files named after your mail folders and news groups. They all have a .DBX suffix. Outlook Express keeps all messages in these database files. If you make copies of these files regularly, you’ll have a safe backup of your OE mail.
Restore (if necessary): To restore the backup data, just copy it back to the directory. You can selectively restore folders by just copying specific files back. Alternatively, you can use OE’s File | Import | Messages feature to import one or more of the backup folders. Email Account Settings"
