How to Repair Outlook Express

Messages are missing from your inbox ! Or Outlook Express refuses to start! How do you repair Outlook Express? Here we are going to discover how to repair Outlook Express folders and recover your emails.

Before we can repair Outlook Express we need to understand how and where Outlook Express stores email messages. Outlook Express stores email messages in databases that have a .dbx file extension. Each Outlook Express folder (even subfolders) has a database associated with it; thus if you have 20 folders you have twenty databases.

The databases have the same name as the folders thus the inbox folder has a database called inbox.dbx. The screen shots below show a typical folder structure and the corresponding .dbx files.






All of the databases are located in a root store or folder, the default location varies depending on the Operating system and can also be changed. See the article- Moving the Location of the Default Store in Outlook Express.

To find the location of your store:
1. open Outlook Express
2. Click Tools> Options.
3. Click the Maintenance tab.
4. Click Store folder and the location appears.
 

Or do a search for *.dbx

Provided Outlook Express is closed these files can be accessed and copied without any problems. An easy backup method is to copy the root folder and its contents to another location. See the article Outlook Express quick and easy backup.
If any of the databases are corrupt you can simple delete it. However, deleting the database will delete all of the messages in it. Therefore it is important to have a backup of the database before you delete it.

We will go through a scenario to illustrate how you can repair Outlook Express in the case of a corrupt database.Before you attempt to repair Outlook Express yourself I would recommend you read the entire scenario first.



Outlook Express Repair Scenario 1


The inbox folder contains at least 20 messages but when you try to view the messages you don’t see any. A simple backup was made a few days prior to the corruption by copying the root store to a backup location. The folder locations we are using are:

C:\\\\Outlook Express corrupt databases ------Contains corrupt databases
C:\\\\Outlook Express repair ----- Contains message file (.eml files) created by extraction program Dbxtract.
C:\\\\Outlook Express backup -- Contains a backup of the databases.

Here in order to repair the inbox folder we are going to delete the database associated with the inbox and then recreate it using our backup. Proceed as follows:

1. Close Outlook Express
2. Locate the database by the method above or by searching for inbox.dbx or *.dbx.
3. Before deleting the file copy it to a new temporary location. The copy can be used for recovering emails.
4. Delete the file inbox.dbx.
5. If you have a backup copy of the folder then copy that backup file into the same directory as the old inbox.dbx file. Please note however that because of the way the extraction utility works sometimes it makes sense not to do this even though you do have a backup available. Goto step 7.
6. Open Outlook Express and open local folders and notice that the inbox folder is still there. If you do a search for inbox.dbx you will find that a new file has been created by Outlook Express. It is however empty. Go to step 8
7. Open Outlook Express and open local folders and notice that the inbox folder is still there and contains messages, they may not all be present, depending on how recent your backup was.
8. The folder is now working normally but may not contain all of the messages prior to it becoming corrupt.


Effectively the repair is complete. What we are going to do now is to recover any lost messages from the corrupt database. All of the Outlook Express repair tools that I’ve examined operate in a very similar fashion. In order to repair outlook express corrupt databases they extract the messages (as .eml files) from the corrupt database and then you must manually copy the messages back into a new folder.

None of the tools I examined modified or deleted the source database. If you use an existing folder then you must first delete the database associated with that folder as we did above.


I will illustrate this by using the free repair tool Dbxtract.

1. Start Dbxtract
2. Set the paths for the import files and output files. Here they are input file is C Outlook Express corrupt databases and output file location is C: Outlook Express repair. See screenshot. Do not check the recover mode box.




3. Click Extract and the messages will be extracted from the corrupt database. The screenshot shows a snapshot of the recovered messages.


4. The Problem that we have now is that we have no easy way of deciding what messages are already in the database (from the backup) and which ones are not, as the message files don’t have the message date information accessible.

5. So we either go through them one by one (painful if there are lots) or copy them all back into the folder (could take a long time). If we decide to copy all of them then we need to delete the present contents otherwise we will get duplicate messages; if this is the case then it would have been better not to have recovered using the backup file.


6. To copy files you need to open the message files using windows explorer and the inbox folder in Outlook Express. Then using the CTRL or shift key you select the files to copy and then drag them into the Outlook Express folder.
If you want to look at other tools to help repair Outlook Express then go to the Outlook Express Tools page.


This article was written and tested on Outlook Express 6.0. It should also be applicable to Outlook Express 5.5. It may work on previous versions of Outlook Express with minor modifications.