|
|
12/4/00 Update: This is a rather old page, dating back to when IE5 & OE5 first came out, and there is now an excellent source called Inside Outlook Express which covers this and many other OE topics. If that web page had been around years ago and I had been aware of it, this page would never have been written. What follows below is the original page, left here for historic reference. |
|
One person I know was very careful to regularly back up the entire contents of the folder Outlook Express which was inside the Program Files folder on her Windows 95 machine. The hard disk crashed, files were restored -- and no email or address book! If you want to back these files up, then keep reading. If you look in Help for Outlook Express about backing things up it says nothing about the address book, and tells you to find the files with the extensions .mbx and .idx and then back them up. But where are they? Well, it depends upon your computer and who typed what the first time somebody ran Outlook Express and set it up! On one computer they were in D:\email, so the user had obviously specified that once and then forgotten it. Select Find from the Start Button menu, then Files or Folders, then *.mbx for the file name and look in C:\ for the mail files, that will give you location. For most people using outlook express they will be found in C:\Windows\Application Data\Outlook Express\Mail and that is the folder that should be backed up to get their mail. For the address book, you can look for *.wab with the Find Files, and you will probably find it or them in C:\Windows\Application Data\Address Book which is what should also be backed up. Whey these things are so deeply hidden in the directory structure for Outlook Express and so much easier to find in Netscape, Eudora, and Forte Agent is a mystery. |
If you're running IE5 (and thus OE5) the mailboxes are no longer *.mbx. Chances are you found this web page through a search hoping to be able to find out how to import those OE4 messages into OE5. You are in luck. Make sure your *.mbx and *.ibx files are in a folder called MAIL. Now in OE5 select import from OE4. When OE5 lets you browse to find the old mail do NOT select the MAIL folder, but instead select the folder that the MAIL folder is in. Isn't that stupid! |
|
|