There are several issues with my Outlook Express email which have me stumped. First, I have a very well stocked Outlook Express and would like to save all these precious emails to CD. However, I cannot find how this can be done. Is there a simple way of doing this operation? Second, it seems I have lost the ability to send emails to a friend overseas. Whenever I send the email the following message appears: ?The following message to <********> was undeliverable. The reason for the problem: 5.4.7 - Delivery expired (message too old) 550-’Access Denied… 1ca5359861981d1d4c8989c1896815685d098c7901255d1ca11c25e99c0d8c6c6cfc…?. This was previously an intermittent problem, but now I cannot send anything to this person! However, when using a different internet connection this problem does not exist. Finally, an odd thing is that most of my incoming email messages show the paper-clip denoting an attachment, but there is no attachment to the message. Why is this happening?

Backing up your email is always a good idea, just in case something goes wrong with the computer. Fortunately this is relatively easy when using Outlook Express, as you just need to copy the mail store directory (which contains all the files which store your email). To begin, you will first need to determine the directory where your email is being stored. Open Outlook Express then go to the “Tools” menu > “Options” and click the “Maintenance” tab. Click the “Store Folder” button. In the window that appears, note the path. This is the path indicating where your email is being stored. Close the Options window and then close Outlook Express. Open My Computer or Windows Explorer and navigate to the mail store path. You may need to enable the display of hidden files and folders to see the relevant directory. To do this, in My Computer or Windows Explorer, go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options”. In the window that appears, click the “View” tab. Enable “Show hidden files and folders” and disable “Hide extensions for known file types” then click OK. You should now be able to see the entire path to the mail store directory. Once you have found the mail store directory, you should see various files within the directory, each with the name of an Outlook Express folder. As you may have guessed, each of these files contains the messages contained within the folder by the same name within Outlook Express. To backup your email, copy the entire mail store folders (and all files contained within) to your backup media, such as a CD, DVD, or portable hard drive. Should you ever need to restore the files, simply copy the backup files back into the Outlook Express mail store folder on the computer. Additionally, upon restoration you should delete the ?folders.dbx? file. This contains an index of all the mail store files, and must be deleted so that Outlook Express can redetect and reindex the mail files. Obviously, this method does not allow you to view and read individual backed-up emails as they are contained within the mail store files. Should you need to backup specific emails, which you want to later read without using Outlook Express, you will need to save the individual emails to a format such as .txt. files or .eml files. To do this, highlight the relevant email within Outlook Express and then go to the “File” menu > “Save As” which allows you to save the email to another location.

Regarding your second question, the error message concerning “Delivery expired ” Access denied?, since the problem only appears to occur when sending email to a particular person, the most likely cause is an incompatibility between your mail server and the recipient’s email server. After researching this problem, it seems a common reason this may occur is due to spam filtering policies on the recipient’s mail server. In particular, your email address (or your ISP) may have been blacklisted by the ISPs receiving mail servers spam filter (or the list to which the receiving mail server subscribes) and therefore this is bouncing your messages. Generally you should receive a more informative message than simply “access denied” and the rather cryptic “delivery expired” portion of the message, but this is still the most likely cause of the problem. The best way to resolve this issue would be to ask your friend to contact their ISP and check whether your email address, or your entire ISP, has been blacklisted for some reason. Potential reasons may be other users on your ISP previously used the ISP to send spam messages, and thus the ISP has ended-up on a blacklist. This is a classic example of a few spoiling the fun for everyone.

Finally, you commented that some of your email messages appear with a paperclip icon (indicating an attachment) yet no attachment exists. This could mean various things, but the most common explanation is that there is something included in the message which Outlook Express thinks is an attachment, but is instead displayed embedded in the email message rather than appearing as a separate attachment. The most common example of this happening is an image included in an email message. While Outlook Express considers the image an attachment, instead of displaying the image within the list of attachments for the message, it embeds and displays the image within the message. This comes down to Outlook Express treating the same item (i.e. an image file) two different ways: once as an attachment, and again as an embedded object within the email message. Therefore, as a first step in determining the cause of the message, check the affected messages to see whether there is any content which may have been mistaken for an attachment. Also, don’t just look at the message itself but also look at the ancillary portions, such as the email signature, which often include graphics and such which could be mistaken for attachments.

The next possibility is that the email was sent in HTML format, but Outlook Express has been configured to read the messages in plain text format. When emails are sent in HTML format, they can include special formatting such as different font sizes, colours, backgrounds, etc. However, older mail readers do not understand HTML so such emails are also transmitted in plain text format, which has the same message content but without any special formatting. Outlook Express is more than capable of reading HTML messages, but some prefer to read messages in plain text (as they do not like the HTML formatting). If your installation of Outlook Express has been configured to read messages in plain text then the attachment icon may be indicating the message is also available in HTML format. To check whether this is the case, open a message which has the attachment icon (but no obvious attachment) and go to the “View” menu > “Message in HTML”. If this solves the problem, you can set Outlook Express to always view messages in HTML format by going to the “Tools” menu > “Options” > and click the “Read” tab. Untick the option “Read all messages in plain text” and click OK. Now all messages will display in HTML format.