Help w/ Outlook Express

[momiji]

It seems I have a bit of trouble, maybe someone can help me out.

My husband somehow accidently deleted my entire Outlook Express account. Not sure how he did it, says he only deleted downloaded game files..

Well, I had about 3 gigs worth of e-mail in there, some sentimental but most work related and very important. I have run the scan but it dosn't seem to turn much up. No one has touched much of anything since he deleted stuff. I have avoiding saving anything to the drive except a recovery program that didn't seem to help (I found it before finding this one).

A lot of files were in the Inbox and more were in folders I created. A lot of them had pictures and documents so it took up a lot of space.

I tried both Fast File and Complete file. It brought up a couple of large files but they were in the "Lost Files" section and didn't seem to be big enough to be the right ones (it said it was too big to preview).

I can't even find a trace of these files. Any ideas?

[GDH]

Do you know if your Outlook Express was set up normally? ie. did your mail download from the Internet and get stored in a .dbx file?

3gb sounds like an awfully big .dbx file. How do you know it was this big?

There are some viruses that will screw around with the location of your mail files. Downloading games from the net raises this possibility. Have you done an up to date virus scan?

I think the first thing to check is whether your .dbx files are actually deleted.

First, open Outlook Express and click on TOOLS - OPTIONS - MAINTENANCE - STORE FOLDER. This will tell you where you dbx files should be. Now navigate to that folder with Windows Explorer to make sure that is not corrupted or is blocking off the files for some other reason.

Next you should do a search of your PC for .dbx extension. User Recover My Files to do this (as it will find the files by header and footer and not just look for the extension). Run the program and select "Complete File Search". In the drive selection window click ADD FOLDER TO SEARCH. Add your C: drive as a folder. Put a tick next to this folder and ignore the message about not having any drive selected. Run the search just for .DBX files and let me know if you find any.

[momiji]

Thanks for the reply. I will try your advice next and see what I come up with. I am 100% sure that 3 gigs is accurate for my inbox (and it's sub folders). I have had this computer for 4 years and get a large volume of e-mail with attachments. I own a small business and get merchandise listings with pics a lot. I also save EVERYTHING I get from everyone. The ML folder I had set up had about 8,000 e-mails in it. I am pretty sure everything was erased...

But I will cross my fingers and pray for the best.