Rescue Outlook Express Data

Losing mail can ruin your whole week. Here's how to avoid the pain.

By Dave Methvin

Updated February 9, 2001

Mail is the killer app of the Internet. So why is so little attention paid to good email backup? Most mail programs give you no help with the task. How do they expect you to recover your email after a crash, or move your mail to a new system? This week I'll give you some tips on how to prevent or recover from an email disaster in Outlook Express, the most-used email client on the Internet.

Exporting Addresses

Getting the data out of your address book for safekeeping is relatively easy. From the menu select File | Export | Address Book and select the comma separated text file as your output format. Then select the fields you want to export. To make sure you know where the backup is going, give a full path name. Most people's address books can easily fit on a floppy disk, so you could save it directly to a file such as A:\ADDRESS.TXT if you wanted. To restore the address book or to get your addresses onto a new system, the process is not quite symmetrical. Select File | Import | Other address book and select the text file option again. You'll be given a list of fields to import. Since you're importing a file that was created by Outlook Express, you usually don't need to make any changes here. After that, click your way on through the wizard and you'll get your address book back.

Account Settings

Data about your mail and news accounts are stored in the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Account Manager. To save this data, start RegEdit and select that key in the left-hand pane. Then from the menu select Registry | Export Registry File. Save the file to a name like ACCOUNTS.REG and put it in a safe place. Like the address list, this will fit on a floppy for most people. To restore the account settings, right-click the .REG file and select Merge. As an alternative, you can save the data one account at a time through Outlook Express: click Tools | Accounts | Export and specify the name of the file to save the settings. Be sure to save this information for every account.

Mail Rules

A reader named Vardis correctly pointed out that I'd forgotten about the mail rules, so I've added this section. You'll find all the information about mail rules and other per-identity settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities. If you run Regedit and export this entire subkey to a file the same way you did with account settings, you can safely store them away. Restoring can be a bit tricky though. Under the Identities key you'll see that each subkey has a strange number that looks similar to {36553740-2BAC-11D3-95B1-00A0C993DADF}. If you're just restoring some botched settings back onto the same system without reinstalling, the numbers shouldn't change and you can just restore the registry entries. If you're moving to a new system or doing a clean install, these numbers may be different and you may have to manually move the entries to the differently numbered entries that are actually being used.

Passwords

Outlook Express, along with those of most other Microsoft applications such as Internet Explorer, stores its passwords in .PWL files in your Windows directory. There's a separate file for each username on the system. It's a good idea to make copies of these frequently, unless you're really good at remembering all those passwords. The .PWL files are generally small and can easily fit on a floppy with the other files I've mentioned above. (In other words, no excuses that you don't have a tape or Zip drive you can use for backup. Nearly everybody has a floppy disk laying around.)

Find the Folders

So much for the trimmings; where's the beef, the messages themselves? From the Outlook Express menu select Tools | Options | Maintenance and click the Store Folder button. You'll get a dialog with the name of the directory that has your mail files. If you look in that directory you'll find files named after your mail folders and news groups, all with the .DBX suffix. OE keeps all messages in these indexed database files. If you make copies of these files regularly, you'll have a safe backup of your OE mail. 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. If you import messages from backups this way, make sure you don't have the files in your OE folders directory!

Mixing Mail and News

One little detail that may put a crimp in your backup plans is that the same directory is used to keep track of news groups. Although mail folders are generally precious, news folders aren't. If you're a reader of high-traffic groups, you may find that the bulk of this directory is taken up by the .DBX files for news groups. Although there is a way to clean out these files from within Outlook Express (Tools | Options | Maintenance | Cleanup Now), I've found that it still can leave some large files behind. The solution is to just delete any .DBX file that corresponds to your news groups. OE is smart enough to recreate them without complaining the next time they are needed.

FOLDERS.DBX and a Crash Fix

The FOLDERS.DBX file is a special one that contains the names of all the other files in the directory. You may notice FOLDERS.DBX becomes progressively more bloated over time. The file stores the name of every mail folder or newsgroup you ever visit, even if you delete the folder or unsubscribe to the group. It also stores the list of news groups for every news server on your accounts list. You may be able to save some space by deleting FOLDERS.DBX and letting OE recreate it when it starts. Note however that FOLDERS.DBX keeps track of your active news group subscriptions, so that information is lost when you delete it. Sometimes FOLDERS.DBX will become corrupted and will cause Outlook Express to crash on startup. To see if this is your problem, just rename FOLDERS.DBX to FOLDERS.SAV and see if OE starts properly. If it isn't the problem, delete the new file that OE created and put the old one back.

Emergency Data Recovery

Although .DBX files aren't plain text files, they do have the full text of your messages inside them. You can open them in WordPad in a pinch and extract important pieces of text. That's useful if the file becomes corrupted and OE can't read it. For example, OE may crash when you try to read a message in the folder or show that a folder is empty, even though the corresponding .DBX file is very big. In that case, rename the .DBX file to a .TXT extension and open it with WordPad. Then copy out whatever important text you can, and recreate a new folder in OE.

Mail Portability

Here's a tip on how to synchronize mail folders between two systems. In particular, it's useful if you have a notebook and a desktop and you want to move your mail over to the notebook for an occasional road trip. It requires some registry editing so the standard warnings apply. Since most people have more mail than can fit on a floppy, it's most practical if you can connect the two computers to a network to synchronize them. Here's how to do it:

If you don't already have a Briefcase icon on the desktop, install Briefcase through Control Panel | Add/Remove | Windows Setup. Then open the Briefcase window.
Share the desktop PC's directory that holds your Outlook Express files (see above for how to find them). From the notebook, open an Explorer window to that shared directory.
Drag all the mail folder files from the shared directory window to the Briefcase window.
Start the Registry Editor (REGEDIT.EXE) and go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{nnn}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0, then find the value named Store Root. (The nnn part will be unique on each system, and you may have multiple ones if you have created multiple identities in OE.) Make a note of the old directory name, and then change it to "C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\BRIEFCASE\". Exit RegEdit.

When you're ready to go on the road with your notebook, right-click Briefcase, select "Synchronize files" and you'll have mail up to date. When you return and before you start using mail on the desktop, synchronize again to update the desktop with any changes you made while you were on the road.

Outlook 2000 Too

So, those are my best bacon-saving techniques for Outlook Express. I have now written a column with similar information for Outlook 2000 if you're using that version.

Java Followup

In last week's column I mentioned that Microsoft had a new version of its Virtual Machine ("VM", aka "Java") available for download. The Microsoft Download Center shows two VM downloads with different build numbers (3802 and 3309) were released in late January. However, if you click on the item for build 3309, it shows you the same information as for build 3802. I have not updated my Java VM since April 2000, but when I go to a command prompt and type JVIEW (part of the VM package) it shows I'm running build 3309 already. Checking a Windows Me setup, I found it reports build 3319 and hasn't been updated since the original Windows Me release. When I install the new VM it does report build 3802 though. One last piece of information: Windows Update is not yet recommending this as an update on any of my systems. The bottom line? I'd treat this new VM as a very optional download unless you are having specific problems with Java.

IE 5.5 SP1 Returns

Without explanation, Microsoft has resumed the download of IE 5.5 SP1. Still no explanation why the link was unavailable for a while. Whatever they may have changed, they haven't indicated the need for any new download in Windows Update. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about this.

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Dave Methvin is a developer at PC Pitstop, a web site that automatically diagnoses and fixes common PC problems. He's also a Contributing Editor to Winmag.com.