urgent help: undelete outlook express folder

[pak000]

In an attempt to delete a single email, my parents have managed to delete an entire mail directory in outlook express, not just into the recycle bin, but also out of that as well

With many long phone calls, i have established that the OE directory dbx file is still located in the directory that the dbx files are read from it also appears to be a reasonable size - about 2MB. Problem is, its not appearing in outlook express

Has anyone got any suggestions to undelete it and make it appear in outlook express again?

Or if not, how can they pull the emails out of the dbx file?

[Splash]

You should be able to import the .dbx back into OE IIRC (years since I've used OE mind) - something like File>Import>Messages or something like - do that and browse to your .dbx then import it.

[pak000]

yeah, i've seen that from my searches of google, I'll give it a go, but i've got to wait until the parents get home, seeing as they have gone out .... obviously not THAT important to them :/

[Splash]

heh - I see no reason why it wouldn't work - I use the same principle in Outlook with PSTs pretty often to merge mailboxes etc.

[pak000]

Unfortunately that didn't work, although i did get hold of some trial software that allowed me to look into the dbx file and see what was in there but there was only a couple of emails in it.... Even more unfortunate is that my parents neglected to tell me that this folder had subfolders, which have now vanished entirely. So i'm going to try some undelete utility for those :/

Telephone support is not fun :/

[Splash]

You're right - I worked on the other end of the phone long enough...

Basically there should be (as far as I'm aware) a dbx for each folder.

You could use this experience as a bargaining chip for 2 things - move them to a less sucky client (Thunderbird 1.5 is out now) and also for a regular scheduled backup - you can use the Windows task scheduler to run a backup job once a week/day/whatever, whisking them to a safer location for just such an event

[pak000]

I don't need an excuse to move them - they'll do as i say, i just can't be bothered with "training" them to use anything else

Where I'm at now:

I have retreived all the relevent dbx files, however they can't be imported into oe and i have tried creating "empty" folders, then replacing the created dbx files with the older version, also to no avail

oe-mail recovery seems to list at least some of the emails but its only trial software so won't let me extract them, anyone know of a freeware program to recover deleted files from oe dbx files?

[pak000]

Success...sort of...It occured to me that the other month i copied all of their stuff from one hdd to another...leaving the old drive untouched...an old backup, but better than nothing