Do you know your Outlook Express?



Outlook express is an email client that comes bundled with Windows 95 and higher and facilitates home users to access their e mails by dialing to an internet service provider.

Outlook express is the primary e- mail client for most e mail needs. Every morning, office goers around the world begin their day with outlook express. They reach their workstations, sign into their account and download their emails. It’s business as usual. But some times everything doesn’t go as planned. The outlook express fails.

Symptoms of Corruption?

The performance of your outlook express may be sluggish, messages may take long hour for download or files and folders may just vanish. The files may be deleted or corrupted. The first clue of a damaged file or folder is the corruption of .dbx files.

The .dbx and .mbx files are used by outlook express for storing files. All files in Outlook Express Folder list are stored on our hard drive with the same file name but with the extension of .dbx (eg inbox.dbx). Together these are saved on a folder named as store folder which is located deep within Documents and Settings folder. It is a hidden folder .The corruption of this folder crashes the outlook express. The DBX files chop each message into 512 byte pieces.

What happens when an item is Deleted from Outlook Express?

When a message is deleted from the deleted items folder, the Outlook Express removes the first 4 bytes of each piece, so it is not possible for outlook to recover a message in its has been deleted from the recycle bin OR permanently deleted using shift + del key.

The following are the symptoms of file corruption in OE

1) Outlook Express feels sluggish when starting and while switching folders.

2) Simple tasks like marking a message as read might take several seconds.

3) Inbox may not display incoming mails.

4) Certain folders might be working improperly.

Vulnerability of Outlook Express with Anti Virus Software!

Virus can spell doom for any of our software’s. But our primary concern while dealing with OE is the anti virus software’s. Because it is well known that outlook is often corrupted by the very software’s believed to protect it. To eliminate the probability of this type of corruption you should disable the e-mail scanning module in your anti-virus program. In most cases, the corruption is due to damaged .dbx files, more precisely, folders.dbx files. This is the folder that indexes the entire store folder. Without its aid Outlook Express cannot do anything. The only solution in case is to delete the corrupt file from the Store Folder.

If your OE appears sluggish or if the mails still take long to download, then the possible alternative is to compact all your Outlook Express folders, this may be suitable for correcting minor errors. But if the problem still persists, you must contact a reputed data recovery company like Stellar which offers Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Standard, Software which repairs damaged / corrupted Outlook Express folders and provides outlook express recovery

All recovered / repaired messages are saved as .eml files at a location chosen by the user.

In spite of the availability of data recovery and file repair software’s like above, it is best to observe certain Precautions while working with outlook express. These are

• Always keep your inbox manageable and empty mails into relevant folders.

• If you use windows XP sp2 (Service Pack 2), disable the automatic background compaction.

• If the compaction is in progress, don’t use the computer till it is completed.

• Maintain adequate back-ups of store folder.

Never try to locate your store folder because one single corruption in that may wreck your outlook express. These basic precautions can be extremely useful if we use OE frequently or even if we have a large amount of correspondence on our OE inbox.