I have complained in the past about how difficult/impossible it is to preserve email messages in Microsoft Outlook Express (MOE) on a long term (decades) basis. See Joys of Plain Text.
I got a rude shock today after doing a repair on my Windows NT operating system: I'd lost all my email because MOE stores the messages under an operating system folder (and I can't seem to change that).
Fortunately, the programmer in me had backed up the Inbox.dbx and Sent Items.dbx folders. But turns out there is no way to import these files into the new installation. I tried to import it from Microsoft Outlook, the full blown email client from Microsoft, and apparently it is not supported.
So I undertook the following surgery.
- Created the a new user account and password to match the old account
- Reinstalled a fresh copy of MOE
- Performed a search for *.dbx and located the folder where MOE puts its files.
- I overwrote the old *.dbx files with the backed-up files -- ignoring the fact that they came from different folders.
- Launched MOE -- it repeatedly crashed. Upon inspection, I found that the dbx files had a permission problem, which was reset by turning off the read-only and archive properties.
That did it. And now you have a documented (and unsupported) trick to back-up email messages in Microsoft Outlook Express.
Still soliciting ideas (
) on how to archive messages from MOE for durable access. I just want an Export to ASCII function/trick.
