Backing up your e-mail & news messages
Outlook Express saves all the messages in each mail folder with a .dbx extension. To find out where these are stored, simply right-click a folder in Outlook Express and choose Properties.
To back up your mail, clean out any garbage using: File, Folders, Compact all Folders, then copy the .dbx files somewhere safe. They're often quite large, so ideally you will need a Zip disk or Network access. You can then copy the duplicates back into the mail folder if the originals get corrupted!
Note. Newsgroup messages are stored in the same folder alongside the .dbx files, with filenames similar to the group they contain messages for. There is no point backing up these files as Outlook Express cannot restore them.
IE4 users - you don't have any .dbx files, instead should have an .mbx file for each mail folder, plus a corresponding set of .idx files (which you can ignore), plus a file named folders.nch, which stores the folders names. These are usually stored in either C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook Express\Mail or c:\Program Files\Outlook Express\Default User\Mail - the exact locations depends on your setup.
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| Last updated | 20/10/2000 |
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| Added to site | 19/10/2000 |
| Views to date | 3718 |
