Outlook Express 6 Woes in 98SE

[technoid]

On one of our 98SE PC's, we have been using OE6 for close to 20 years now.  It's not perfect, there have been some times there have been issues that couldn't be (and have been) solved, but it's easy to use and has been of good convenience and we don't intend to stop using it, at least once it's hopefully fixed/perfect again. In the past year though, my dad has friends that keep sending tons of mails with large megabyte attachments, mostly unprocessed photos from their smartphones (they aren't computer nerds, so they know nothing about jpeg compression). Some of these attachments were in the order of 5MB to 10MB or more. After looking at them, he/we usually then delete the email(s). However, as most know, the megabytes increase the filesize of the Inbox db.  The filessize stays the same even after you trash the emails, until you then have to compact it.  Well, we neglected to compact the Inbox for a while now, so the size bloomed to almost 900MB.  When I recently (a few days ago) attempted to compact, it said something (I didn't jot it down) to the effect of "msimn caused invalid page fault in directdb.dll."  I looked this up and it said to replace the corrupt folder db.  When I tried that it pretty much erased (or reset) everything in the Inbox.  We don't want that to happen, because we still have tons of mail in there we do not want to get erased. Luckily I made a backup of the Inbox db, so I recopied that back in the appropriate folder (under \Identities folder).

 

So what are our options? 

 

Here are some of my ideas of which I haven't tried anything yet >

 

- First idea:  Make a new folder, say "Inbox_temp", then move all the email from the corrupt Inbox db to this one, then rename it back to Inbox, while the previous Inbox is first renamed to something else.  However, the question is, when I start/click the "Mail Sending/Receiving" button, will it start receiving from the last point forward, or will it start receiving from the very first email on the server?  

 

Note, we only have 56k dialup, and there is about 1.5 GB of mail on the email server, so if this new Inbox happened to start at the very beginning, it would takes days to complete.  We don't want it to start from the very first email on the server. 

 

- Second idea:  Rename this corrupt Inbox to something else, like "Inbox_Old", then let OE6 automatically make a new empty Inbox.  However, will this new Inbox also start receiving mail from the first and oldest email from the server or will it start from the last time the receive button was pushed?  I assume it will start from the very beginning which is what we don't want. 

 

I am thinking the first idea has some promise, but not really sure. We don't want to continue receiving new mail into this corrupt Inbox, but if we get a new (or possibly repaired) Inbox, we want to start receiving mail at the last point it left off (which would be about a couple weeks ago, iirc). 

 

Any other ideas?  This PC's specs are:  Win 98SE (with Soporific autopatcher),  Pentium-based mobo with 256MB memory (max) at 75Hz frontside bus, 450MHz AMD K6-III, and about 750MB harddisk free. Yeah, it's an old machine, heh. Because of the low overhead of the CPU and memory and the bloated 900MB Inbox, Outlook Express will sometimes say low memory and will not show the Inbox unless I recover as much memory as possible as well as a fresh reboot.  However, I know it will run perfectly and quickly once the Inbox is properly optimized.

 

Anyway, we need your input, thanks.

 

 

 

[jaclaz]

It would seem much simpler to me to copy the e-mails you actually want to keep to a new .dbx and then replace the "inbox" one with the one you made.

A suitable procedure is given in this seemingly unrelated thread:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170986-emails-vanished-from-outlook-express/

 

Just try copying to the new .dbx a a handful of (let's say yesterday's) e-mails and try connecting to the server, if it starts downloading all old mails, stop (and you'll need to find another way).

 

From what you say your current .dbx is not by itself "corrupted" it is only too d@mn big to be compacted (possibly on that OS or on that machine), it is possible that if you copy the .dbx to another machine it can be compacted "there".

 

Another thing, why do you have 1.5 Gb of old mail on the server?

I mean I could understand 900 Mb but 1.5 Gb?

 

jaclaz

[jumper]

> about 750MB harddisk free

This is less than the size of the file you are trying to compact. Free ~2GB by moving files to a thumb drive and then retry the compaction.

Otherwise, instead of compacting the Inbox in-place, compact by moving all emails to a new folder. Use OE to create a new folder "Oldbox" (both on the server and locally) and move all contents from Inbox to Oldbox. This will require having >900MB free locally.

Then you should be able to easily compact the empty Inbox or just delete its .dbx. The Inbox on the server will also be empty, so no worries about redownloading "everything". (There also should be a setting somewhere named something like "Leave mail on server" that prevents email from downloading unless you open it.)

[submix8c]

Suggestion - NEVER compact *all* folders.

 

Do them one at a time, Empy Recycle Bin (it puts a copy of the old one there), rinse & repeat for the next one.

 

You can Delete multiple (not all) in the Inbox, delete contents of Deleted, compress, Empty Recycle, rinse & repeat.

 

The LARGEST Folder in OE will clobber you (goes to Recycle Bin). So start with the Smallest and work your way up.

 

Underkill.