My computer was flood damaged except for the hard drive. I bought an external SATA docking station so that I could connect the hard drive via USB to my new computer. I managed to find most of my data (pictures, documents, etc) but I cannot find my emails from Outlook Express 6. These emails contained quite a bit of important information, so it would be good to regain access to these. Can you help?

This is a good question as restoring and transferring email from another computer is a bit more of an involved process. In Outlook Express emails are stored in a series of mail store files – these are essentially database files which hold all of the email messages. The way Outlook Express structures these mail store files is that there is one mail store file per Outlook Express folder. For example, there is a file for the Inbox folder, Sent Items folder, Deleted Items folder, plus any other custom folders which you may have created in Outlook Express. Our first step in restoring your email is finding these mail store files on the hard drive. Unless you know where to look this can be a tricky proposition, but fortunately we know where to look so this should be a bit more straight-forward. Connect the hard drive from the old computer to the new computer and then open Windows Explorer or My Computer. The folder which contains the mail store files is hidden so we first need to enable the display of hidden files and folders. Go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options”. In the Folder Options window that appears select the “View” tab. Enable the option “Show hidden files and folders” then click “Apply” and OK to save the changes. Now we can navigate to the mail store folder. The mail store folder should be located at the following path on your old hard drive (replace X with the drive letter of your old hard drive) – X:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{1234…ABCD…GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express . If you cannot find this path then make sure that you are actually on the old hard drive and are not accidentally on the new computer’s hard drive. Once you are at this path you should see many files within the folder, each named after one of your Outlook Express folders.

As you can tell, double-clicking on the mail store files will not do anything as you cannot directly open these files. Instead, you will need to import those files into the Outlook Express installation on your new computer. However, we have likely run into a problem with this suggestion – since you have a new computer it is probably not running Windows XP but is instead running Windows Vista or Windows 7, both of which do not have Outlook Express but instead have a new version of this software called Windows Live Mail. There is no need to worry though – Windows Live Mail can import messages from Outlook Express without issue. In fact, the procedure to import messages into Windows Live Mail is very similar to importing messages into Outlook Express so we only need to outline one procedure which can be applied to both scenarios.

Before going any further, I suggest that you make a copy of the “Outlook Express” folder containing a copy of all your mail store files, and place this copy on the desktop of the computer. It’s never a good idea to operate on the one and only copy of your data, just in case something goes wrong and that data becomes corrupted (while it is extremely unlikely, I would not want to take this risk given the importance of such data). Once the data has been copied to the desktop, open Windows Live Mail or Outlook Express on the new computer. The first thing you need to do, before anything else, is setup your email accounts in the program. If this is the first time you have run Windows Live Mail or Outlook Express the first run wizard should appear to guide you through the account setup process.

Once your email account is setup we can import your email. Go to the “File” menu (if this is not visible in Windows Live Mail press the ALT key to show the menu bar) > “Import” > “Messages”. The first window will ask you to select the format of email you wish to import, so select “Microsoft Outlook Express 6” and click “Next”. If you are importing messages into Outlook Express then you will be prompted about the source of the email messages that you wish to import – select “Import mail from an OE6 store directory”. However, in Windows Live Mail you may not be asked and instead it will proceed immediately to the next screen, where you need to navigate to the location of the mail store folder that you wish to import – this is the folder which we just copied to the desktop on your computer. Once this has been selected, click “Next”. When asked which folders you wish to import make sure you select “All folders” (or, if you only wish to import certain folders, manually select those folders). I do recommend that you import all folders, rather than selectively indicating the folders you wish to import, because at least then you know that all the email will be imported. Once you have made the selection continue to follow through the wizard to complete the import process.

Once the import process has finished all of the email from your old computer should be present in Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail.