Retrieving lost emails in outlook express

[dennilson]

Can anyone help? My computer has crashed and died and I have replaced it with a new desktop. I have fitted my old hard drive in the new computer, which now acts as a "slave"drive, however, I cant seem to access my old emails and addresses from Outlook express with a view to pulling them across to my new hard drive. Could anyone help

[Rollo]

You could do a search for ".dbx" files on the old HD, and then copy those files to the the new HD into the "Local folders" where OE stores its files.

[squarebear]

Rollo is correct. That's exactly what I had to do when my hard drive crashed.

If you only have one user set up on your machine, you may have to create a temporary administrator user, as I got errors saying, "cannot copy files while user is logged on".

[dennilson]

Thanks for those answers guys, I have now found the dbx files however, my news system is vista windows using the new microsoft mail, it wont read these files or allow me to open them, just wondering what programme would open them? cheers

[squarebear]

You need to put Outlook Express back on,if possible, as these are Outlook Express files.

[Rollo]

For Windows Mail you need to use the Import function you will find in the drop down menu when you click on "File".

File > Import > Messages

Then Windows mail will read them.

[squarebear]

I thought that only imported files which had been exported from other applications rahter than the raw .dbx files?

I could be wrong though.

[Rollo]

I imported all my existing .dbx emails into Windows Mail when I got a Vista PC.

[Rollo]

But you may be right squarebear - in that I exported them onto a memory stick using OE and then imported them from the stick into Windows Mail.

[squarebear]

That's what I'm thinking.

I would suggest:

1) installing Outlook Express
2) copy your .dbx files into your PC
3) export your messages and contacts to a csv file
4) import them in to your new mail client.