APCUG Reports
April-June 2007

During the summer of 2004, I started to get a strange error message in Outlook Express (OE). The error message said something similar to “You are either running out of hard disk space or you have an insufficient amount of memory.” I checked and I had over 20 GB of free space on both hard drives and with 512 MB that could not be the issue.

So, I ignored the message partly because I was very busy and the error message didn’t make any sense to me at the time. I got the message two more times and proceeded to ignore it then as well.

Lesson #1 that I learned is that “No matter how illogical the error message is, never ignore an error message.” If possible, take a snapshot of the error message. This will be invaluable in your research to determine what is causing this error message to be displayed.

Then my OE Inbox locked up and I could no longer access any of the messages, which were previously in my Inbox. Instead Outlook Express created a new Inbox(1) for me. I did a considerable amount of research over the next few months and discovered that there are all kinds of chug holes related to OE. More about the chug holes later.

I discovered that there were several freeware programs, such as MailNavigator and Magellan and I discovered this website, http://www.oehelp.com/default.aspx, which has links to a lot of other excellent websites. For more detailed information on DBXpress, see http://www. oehelp.com/DBXpress/Default.aspx. One of the major recommendations on this site is to make a copy of the corrupt Inbox; so I copied the Inbox that I was locked out of and named it InboxBK1.dbx file.

This website is where I discovered Stephen L. Cochran’s program, DBXpress, version 1.40 for $24.95, which I ordered. Stephen provides free updates with any purchase of DBXpress.

First, I tried MailNavigator and then Magellan to see if these programs would work but neither would work. Then I tried DBXpress and it worked like a champ, but first I discovered that I needed to create an output file. So I created this output folder as a sub-folder under the folder, which contained InboxBK1.dbx.

Then I selected the path for InboxBK1 for Input file and then I selected the path for the output file. The next step was to click the extract button and the program started to hum.

It took about an hour to complete all of the steps but eventually, DBXpress saved every message that was in my InboxBK1 to the output file, all 17,077 messages. Here is a picture of DBXpress hard at work.

And here is the final snapshot of the final DBX screen.

Here are a few of the things that I learned about how to safely operate OE.

• The out of memory error means that the Inbox or OE subfolder has gotten too large for the folder to be loaded. The maximum size allowed by OE for any folder is 2 GB; however, my Inbox crashed at 634,000 MB. The 2 GB maximum applies to every folder in OE.
• I set up lots of sub-folders under both my Inbox folder and my Sent folder.
• The recommendation for the maximum number of messages that any folder should contain is 2,000, which I adhere to.
• Using the “Find” command, you can still find any message that you need, no matter what sub-folder that it is in.
• Compact “All Folders”. Never compact single folders because sometimes this can cause your OE files to become corrupted. Fortunately, I did not have a corrupted Inbox, just an over-sized Inbox.
• Perform basic housekeeping at least every couple of months, where you sort your Inbox by subject and delete all of the email messages that you don’t need to keep. I delete email messages from ZDNet, WordTips, Access, etc. Based on the quality of the content, I have even unsubscribed to a few of these listserves, which has also helped.

OE has been updated in Vista and it is now called Windows Mail. For those of you who are already running Vista, I think that the tips above apply to Windows Mail as well.

Linda Moore
APCUG Director
Past President of North Texas PC Users Group
Linda.Moore@ntpcug.org
Copyright © 2007 Linda Moore