Recently I had to reinstall Windows XP on my computer so I backed-up all of my data (favorites, documents and Outlook Express) onto an external hard drive. Restoring the favorites and documents was easy and did not present a problem. However, I am unable to read anything from Outlook Express as I cannot open the DBX files using any programs.

It is good that you had enough knowledge to backup the DBX files for Outlook Express, as those are the files which store all of your Outlook Express data and it is critical they are backed-up if you are completing a reinstallation of Windows or migration to a new computer. As you have discovered, the DBX files are not like other types of files (such as documents) which you simply double-click to open and read with a particular application. Instead, the DBX files are structured more like a database file which Outlook Express reads to store and display your email. Therefore, we need to place these in the correct location so that Outlook Express can read the files. Before doing so, you should setup Outlook Express with the configuration for your email account. Open Outlook Express and because this is the first time the application has been run it should show the first run wizard, allowing you an opportunity to setup your email account. Be careful though, as once the email account has been setup Outlook Express will create a fresh set of DBX files on the computer and may automatically commence downloading new messages from the email server into the fresh DBX files. We don’t want to do this, since we are going to be replacing those fresh DBX files with the DBX files that we restore from your backup, and if the fresh DBX files contain any email messages those emails will be lost as a result. We’ll deal with this situation later, but for the moment it will be a lot easier if no new email is downloaded. I suggest that before ending the account setup wizard you disconnect the network from your computer (or disconnect from the internet) so that it cannot successfully connect to the mail server to download new messages.

Once the account setup has completed you will be presented with an Outlook Express window containing the default mail folders, such as Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, etc. At this point we can start the migration of the email, so close Outlook Express. There is a special folder called the Outlook Express mail store folder which contains the DBX files for a particular user. This should be located at the same place which you visited when backing-up your DBX files before reinstalling Windows. The default location is: C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{ABCD…1234…}\Microsoft\Outlook Express . To find this location you will need to enable the display of hidden files and folders. In Windows Explorer go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options” then click the “View” tab and enable “Show hidden files and folders”. It would also be worthwhile to enable the display of file extensions by unticking “Hide file extensions for known file types”. If you are unable to find the mail store folder at this location then you can check the location (in case it is different) by opening Outlook Express (with the network still disconnected, so that it doesn’t start downloading new mail items) and then go to the “Tools” menu > “Options” > “Maintenance” tab and click the “Store Folder” button. This will show a window with the current location of the mail store folder. As the text field displaying the location is quite small it will likely not show the entire path. In this case, you should be able to use the mouse pointer to click within the text field and drag along to the right so that it scrolls and you can see the remaining portion of the path. Alternatively, double or triple click within the text field to highlight the entire path, and then copy and paste the text into a Notepad document (or like) to see the entire path.

Once you arrive in the mail store folder you will see a series of DBX files representing each of the folders in Outlook Express. There is a one-to-one relationship of DBX files to folders, so for each folder you have in Outlook Express there will be a DBX file which contains all the messages stored within that folder. At this point there should only be the DBX files for the default Outlook Express folders (e.g. Inbox, Sent Items, etc). There should also be a Folders.dbx file, which I will explain the purpose of shortly.

Delete all of the default DBX files contained within the mail store folder, as we don’t want to use any of those since we are restoring our own DBX files from backup. Once this has been done, copy all of the backed-up DBX files from your external hard drive into the mail store folder. Once this has completed, delete the Folders.dbx file, if this was copied across from your external hard drive (which should be the case, although not always). The Folders.dbx file contains a master index of all the DBX files being used by Outlook Express. Since we are copying across a new set of DBX files we need Outlook Express to re-index all of these files, otherwise it will not recognise the DBX files and exclude them from displaying in Outlook Express. Be aware, if you have a particular folder hierarchy in Outlook Express (i.e. folders containing sub-folders) this hierarchical relationship will be lost and all folders will be located at the same level. No data will be lost, just that all the folders will be displayed at the root level rather than nested within their parent folder. In this case you will need to manually re-establish the hierarchy by placing the sub-folders within the relevant parent folders.

Once the Folders.dbx file has been deleted, re-open Outlook Express and you should see that all of your mail and folders have been restored. You can also reconnect your network and proceed to download new email. This new email will be stored in the correct mail store files (i.e. the files which we restored from backup and contain all of your previous email).

As mentioned earlier, it is important that you don’t download any new email into the fresh DBX (mail store) files as those files will be replaced with the copies restored from backup, so any mail stored in those fresh DBX files will be lost once they have been replaced. However, if you didn’t realise this and proceeded to download email into the fresh DBX files then you are in the trickier position of not being able to restore your old email for fear of losing the new email. We will now discuss how to merge the two copies of the DBX files (new and old) together so that you can restore your old email while keeping the newly downloaded email. Outlook Express offers the facility to import email from Outlook Express. This may seem like a strange thing to say, but it means that you can import email into Outlook Express which is contained in another set of Outlook Express mail store files (i.e. DBX files).

Start by copying the backup of your mail store folder (i.e. the folder containing all the DBX files) from your external hard drive to some easily accessible location on your computer, such as the Windows desktop. It is important that the entire mail store folder backup is copied with all DBX files within. This copy of the data does not need to be placed anywhere in particular, as we will only be using it for the import operation and then deleting it once the import has completed. While you could import the DBX files directly from the backup external hard drive it is much better practice to operate on data which has been copied, rather than operating on your master backup copy (in case something goes horribly wrong and the data gets corrupted or deleted). Once you have copied the data onto your local computer, open Outlook Express and go to the “File” menu > “Import” > “Messages”. In the import wizard window that appears, select “Microsoft Outlook Express 6” and click “Next”. Another window will appear asking for the location of the email that you wish to import. Select “Import mail from an OE6 store directory” and click OK. You will now be prompted for the location of the mail store folder that you wish to import. Point the wizard to the copy of the mail store folder backup on your local computer (e.g. on the desktop, if you copied the folder to that location) then click “Next”. You will then need to select the folders to be imported. I suggest that you leave this as “All folders” unless you want to exclude/include some specific folders. Click “Next”. The import will commence and once finished will show a success message and you can click “Finish” to close the wizard.

When you now open Outlook Express all your new email and backed-up email should be present. Be aware, if (somehow) the same message is contained in both your new mail store files and old (backed-up) mail store files then after the two have been merged, that message will be duplicated in Outlook Express. This is fairly unlikely to happen, but just be aware that it would not be a good idea to import the email again (for whatever reason) as most of the messages will already exist and will end up being duplicated.

You should now also be able to delete the copy of the mail store backup that you made on your local computer from the external hard drive. However, ensure that you do not delete the master copy on the external hard drive itself, as you should definitely keep that copy just in case it is needed in the future!

For the benefit of other readers, it should also be noted that occasionally you may find yourself in the situation where the DBX files are corrupted and unreadable by Outlook Express. Should this happen then it is certainly not a good situation, but there may be ways around the problem. In this case please contact me for advice as there are some utilities which may be able to recover the data although, as is the case with all data corruption, a successful recovery cannot be guaranteed.