Date Posted:18:16:52 04/12/04 Mon Author:Papa Bear Subject: Corrupt Outlook Express Database
Very rarely one or more of your OutlookŪ Express folders may become corrupted. The most likely cause is turning off the computer while Outlook Express was still updating the folder.
When this occurs you may notice these symptoms:
Moving a message from one folder to another seems to go on forever.
Outlook Express displays a window with text to the effect that it can't move the message.
XPress Pix OE displays a message telling you that a folder is probably corrupt.
Here is what to do.
First, don't panic. You will probably be able to recover from the situation.
Second, close Outlook Express immediately. and don't let it start up until you know more.
Third, use your favorite search engine on the words "Outlook Express corrupt fix download." You will find a large number of resources out there.
Getting Back Up
If the corrupted folder is not your Inbox nor a folder to which your mail rules are automatically moving or copying messages, then you can restart Outlook Express and use it normally with one exception. Just don't touch the corrupted folder.
If the corrutped folder is a folder to which your mail rules are automatically moving or copying messages, restart Outlook Express and do three things:
Rename the corrupted folder.
Create a new folder with the same name and position in the folder tree.
Check your rules to make sure that they still are hooked up to the desired (new) folder. If not fix the rules.
If the corrupted folder is your Inbox, there are two approaches. The conservative one is to hold off using Outlook Express until you can recover fully. More optimistically - this is what Baby Bear did - you can continue to use Outlook Express. However, some significant portion of the messages will not be movable, namely those received near the time of the corruption. Just don't attempt to move those messages until full recovery is done.
Recovering the Messages
A quick search found four programs that recover messages for you. (You will find these same four programs linked to many different pages.) They differ significantly in pricing, and none of them have the Three Bears Software, LLC pricing philosophy.
The tested demos are extremely crippled. The full versions presumably work just fine. Thus, you will have to buy the program to do the recovery. Compared to Baby Bear's just right pricing, they are a bit pricey ($45 to $150).
What all these programs do is scan the database for messages and save them separately as eml files into an output folder. If you want the recovered messages to be in Outlook Express, start OE and drag them into an appropriate new OE folder. Delete the old folder when recovery is complete, and rename the new folder to the old folder's name. Make sure that you have your View set to display read messsages your you will not see them.
If the corrupted folder is your Inbox, then consult the articles on the web for how to replace the folder after recovering any messages in it.
You are encouraged to report your experiences with these methods here. Also, Baby Bear suggests he'd really like to know how often this happens. Is being able to deal with corruption a good feature to have in the next release?
Minimizing problems
The File | Folder | Compact commands should be used frequently, especially on the Inbox. This will minimize the size of the folders on your hard drive. This makes the recovery process much faster. (Baby Bear's test case was 1/4 of a GB. Not smart:-(
Don't panic when the compact folder process seems to take to long. Baby Bear forgot to look at the size of his Inbox and turned off the computer. It takes a while to deal with 250 MB.
And, of course, don't shut down your computer while the compacting is taking place. If the file has grown to a substantial size, compacting can take a long time. (Yep, I said the same thing two different ways. It's that important:-)
