Urgent Email Help Needed

For about 2 years I've been my mums tech support now I have a problem that needs fixing fast....

Basically my mum uses Outlook Express 6 (.dbx Format) and builds up massive email folders, its her work.

She had a 1.99 GB Sent Items!!

So we had been having problems in the past 2 weeks where every email she sent was going into Outbox and Sending itself but then it was not moving itself to Sent Items. Outlook said an error had occurred. So it was sending the email every time you pressed send receive unless you manually moved it to a separate folder, it wouldn't let you move it to Sent Items.

Now today she starts up her computer, phones me in a panic and says that all her Sent Items and another Folder of older work emails have disappereaed. The folders show up by they are empty. SO, I went and had a look, as she said the folder were empty, but looking in the Application Data/Identities etc . Directory, Sent Items was still there weighing in at about 1.9 GB!

Does this mean its corrupted or there is a problem with Outlook Express. I tried to find out the problem by installing Thunderbird, it imported everything fine but also in that Sent Items does not show up.

Its not the end of the world because we backed up about 3 weeks ago but there are some emails we would like to have back.

So how can we fix it?

How can we stop it happening in the future?

Where does Thunderbird store e.g. Email Folder e.g. Inbox.whatextenstion? So I can find them and start backing them up...

Thanks,

Tim

C:\documents and settings\username\application data\thunderbird\profiles\e5myhrmk.default\mail\pop******, in one of the folders under pop, the sent file should show up (without a file extension).

You can open this file by double clicking and selecting wordpad (or other text editor), it's just a text file, so you can select all and copy to a new location.

do you use pop3 or imap? in the future you may want to use imap as mail is kept on the server so if anything happens you just redownload it. However it is linked to your pc so if you delete something on your pc is deleted from the server.

also how is the hard drive formatted? fat32/ntfs? fat32 has a 2 gig limit.


Also i believe outlook express used to have a 2gig limit, so you may want to upgrade to outlook, or i think you could create another folder and just drag mail over to it, create folders like backup1, backup2 etc etc.

Currently my Mum is using Thunderbird. We are on orange broadband and it was Pop3, can we swap to Imap. Also how can we get her onto Outlook because it doesn't want to seem to import .dbx files....

Thanks,

Tim

Not all ISPs support IMAP (because of the potential storage issues) It is really only an option in a corporate environment or if you are operating your own mailserver. (However you may wish to check with Orange BB - but I'd be surprised if they do - and if they do, they may charge as you will be using more of their storage space)

I think you need to export your outlook express files to a form that outlook can import.

How do I export them into a file type that outlook will except?

Duplicate post - deleted

It has been a LONG time since I used Outlook express but look at Outlook express and see what the export options are, and then at Outlook and see what the import options are.

Alternatively, a 30 second Google search threw up

this link