My computer is running Outlook Express 6 on Windows XP SP3. Recently, I seemed to have experienced a two-week email drought where I kept getting the “No new messages” message, although I was able to send emails. When it became clear that I wasn’t just unpopular but that people were trying to send emails to me, I contacted my ISP who, through various trial and error means, determined that the emails were leaving their server, but were somehow not making it into the Inbox. There is no spam or message rules operating on Outlook Express or through security software, and the problem was rectified by deleting the email account and then re-adding it as a new email account (with exactly the same settings!) so that email is now being received. Is there any way that I can find the missing emails which, according to my ISP, were downloaded but which never appeared in our Inbox? From one of your earlier hints I tried compacting the message folders, but to no avail!

This is certainly a strange phenomenon, since Outlook Express appears to have been checking for email and successfully completing the Send/Receive operation without error messages. However, I am doubting that Outlook Express was receiving the email messages at all since normally it would notify that messages are downloading and also there would be a delay while those messages are being downloaded. However, from your description of the problem it seems that Outlook Express was not even downloading the messages from the server since it immediately gave the “No new messages” notification together with, presumably, no delay. Deleting and re-adding the email account should not have had any major affect on the problem since that is simply re-inputting the credentials used to send and check email and is not directly linked to the mail storage on your computer. The only possible reason that this would have worked is if there had been some kind of obscure setting in the account that was causing this behaviour, although I do not know what setting could have been causing this problem. Perhaps it is possible that your ISP changed something on their end at the same time that you re-added the email account, making it seem like the re-addition fixed the problem when it was actually something at the ISPs end of the connection.

Even so, it would be worthwhile double-checking that those messages are not somewhere in your mail store files for Outlook Express. This is incredibly unlikely for the reasons listed above, but we should be exhaustive to ensure that those missing messages are not somewhere obscure. There is a piece of software called DBXanalyzer made by a Sydney based company (www.di-mgt.com.au/dbxanalyzer/index.html). This software allows you to directly open and read DBX files, which is the file format used by Outlook Express 5 and 6 to store email messages. There is a trial version of this software available so you can try before purchasing, should you wish to use this software to recover any emails. Once you have downloaded and installed DBXanalyzer you will need to locate the mail store directory on your computer which contains the DBX files so that you can open these files using DBXanalyzer. The location of the mail store folder is defined within Outlook Express and can be found by going to the “Tools” menu > “Options”. In the Options window that appears, click the “Maintenance” tab and the “Store Folder” button. A window should appear with the location of the mail store folder. Write down this location. Once this has been done, close any open windows within Outlook Express and then close Outlook Express itself.

In order to navigate to the location of the mail store folder you will need to enable the display for hidden files and folders, since the mail store folder is likely nested within a hidden folder. Open Windows Explorer or My Computer then go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options”. In the Folder Options window that appears, click the “View” tab and enable “Show hidden files and folders” and untick “Hide file extensions for known file types”. Click OK to save and close the settings. Now, open the DBXanalyzer utility and go through the procedure to open a DBX file. When the window appears asking you to select the DBX file, navigate to the previously recorded Outlook Express mail store folder path. Within this mail store folder you should see several DBX files. Each of these DBX files represents one folder within your Outlook Express installation. For example, you will see a DBX file for Inbox, Sent Items, Drafts, etc. Each of these DBX files contains the email stored within the folder with the same name within Outlook Express. Assuming that you wish to try and locate the missing email then most likely this email would have been placed into the Inbox folder and therefore we should take a look in the Inbox.DBX file. Using DBXanalyzer, open the Inbox.DBX file and check the email contained within. If your email is contained within this file, but not accessible through Outlook Express, there appears to be some kind of corruption happening. In this case you should also be able to use DBXanalyzer to export the emails so at least they can be read.

In the event that you cannot find the missing email within the Inbox.DBX file then you may wish to also look at some other folders, such as Deleted Items, in case the emails were (somehow) moved into that folder after being downloaded. We are starting to clutch at straws looking for an explanation, but it is worth a look. Should you still be unable to find the missing emails after checking the DBX files using DBXanalyzer then there is one last avenue that we can pursue, although it is only an outside chance at best. When you download email from a mail server then your email client (i.e. Outlook Express) usually tells the mail server to delete the messages after being downloaded. However, you can also leave the messages on the server. In this case, the email client marks the downloaded messages as having been downloaded and on subsequent download attempts will only download new email messages (i.e. emails which have not been tagged as downloaded). There is an outside chance that if your email client was malfunctioning then those emails may still be on the email server. To check, you will need to login to your email account using your ISPs webmail facility. Most ISPs provide a webmail facility so that users can check their email when away from their home or main computer. The webmail facility is usually accessible using a link on the front page of the ISPs website, and you login using your normal email username and password. Once you have logged into webmail, check whether the missing messages are present. If so, you may not be able to download these messages using Outlook Express but at least you can read and reply to the messages through webmail. That said, if you do wish to download some of the messages to Outlook you could use webmail to forward that email to your own email address. This will send that message back to you, but since it is a new message it should be downloaded by Outlook Express.

However, if the missing messages are not found after trying all the above methods then unfortunately they seem to be gone. Why this occurred in the first place is a mystery and it seems unlikely that you will be able to recover the messages.