Outlook Express debacle

[skylark53]

Just spent 2 hours recovering from an Outlook Express (OE) disaster. I think it’s all OK now but this wasn't how I'd planned to spend my Saturday afternoon. I want never, ever to go there again, and that means understanding what went wrong, so that I can avoid it in the future. If you read this and you have any ideas, please, please tell me. Thanks!

For historical reasons I have several OE ‘message stores’. Let’s call my current store “store 2” and the old one “store 1”. So when I fired up OE today, it was using store 2.

I’m accustomed to moving between the stores, via Tools\Options\Maintenance\Store folder. I instruct OE to start using store 1, and it reports it’s found some files there; do I want to use them? I say “yes”. This stops OE deleting the contents of store 1 and moving the contents of store 2 into it. As I say, I've done it many times, always without difficulty.

So far so good. I re-opened OE and worked on the messages I needed to view. Then I reset the store to store 2, closed and re-opened OE.

Some time later, on a whim, I navigated to store 1, wondering whether it could be merged into the current store. And immediately I could see that something was wrong: I spotted some folders I knew I’d created only recently, and long after I had last used this store (February). Worried, I checked a couple of the corresponding folders in OE and they were empty.

I went straight to store 2 and saw to my dismay that although all the dbx files seemed to be there, many were of size 75kb - the size of an file containing no messages.

Which dbx files were they? They were all the ones with names beginning 0-9 and A-F. Everything higher in the alphabet was fine. A quick check of file size in store 1 revealed that these files had been moved there. Everything I know about Outlook Express suggests this is impossible.

I painstakingly checked each of my 100 or so OE folders, noting which ones were empty and copying the appropriate dbx files back from store 1 into store 2.

When I fired up OE again, to my relief all my mail messages were present. So I seem to have recovered, but it absolutely was not fun and I don’t like it when inexplicable things happen.