I've been trying to reorganise all my email messages in Outlook Express (OE) 6, and I've "lost" two folder files with a large number of messages in them (lost as in they still exist, but OE can't see them now).

I've tried Ragnar Hellspong's ForMorph (reliable, but very slow), which I've had to abort because it is so slow.

I've tried Stephen Cochran's DBXtract (reliable, but also rather slow).

Now, when I last tried ForMorph on one file with 44,000 messages in it, I had to stop it because it was taking so long after around 4,000 messages were imported, and I saved the session in the import scheduler so that it could be restarted later.

I then ran DBXtract 3.9, which only recovered 4,400 items before it finished with an "Extract completed" message - it had only processed around 12% of the file size and 10% of the messages.

I now have DBXtract 4, and I am running that as I write this, so I shall see how that gets on. I'm worried that ForMorph has changed the header of the DBX file so that it seems to have fewer items than it does, but it shouldn't have done that.

Any other ideas for how I can get these messages back as some of them are very important?

And people wonder why I'm switching email client to Eudora... <g>.

Thanx.

re:

I have been using it. repair outlook express and outlook express repair more stable and secure than other programs.

Microsoft outlook

Have you tried opening microsoft outlook and importing the folders from the other profile?

You're lucky you made it to 44,000 messages. I've seen OE blow itself up at only a thousand or two.
I'm curious, though, how big is the DBX files for these?

If you are going to store so many messages, be sure to use a much more robust E-mail client that can handle the load.

good luck

Why don't you install MozillaThunderbird?
It will automatically import all your OE junk.
Eudora is not quite 'modern' anymore.

here's some email conversion tools that may be helpful.

btw: there are two major techniques for client email storage

1. the folder containing emails is one big file
2. each email folder is a directory and unquie emails are stored as descrete file therein

With style(2), you can keep your email history from the year 0001 forward.
Technique(1) will limit the size of your email folder to the maximum file size allowed by your
OS, usually 2^32-1 or 2.17gb. This is a major reason to prune your mailboxes for old email.

Outlook Express and sadly even Thunderbird use style(1).
As I recall, Netscape uses style(2).