Outlook Express compacted folders....

Binxy

And deleted all emails in first 6 folders!

How?
Why? :mad:

Last night I right-clicked on the toolbar, on OE to shut it down. I assumed I clicked on "close" but a little grey box came up saying "Compacting folders" with a blue progress bar.

I watched it for a few seconds (as it sped through several folders) thinking "Why is it doing this!?" Then I hit "cancel" (Thank gods!) and shut it down. This morning, I switched on the PC to discover it hadn't "compacted" so much as "deleted" - everything contained in the first 6 folders of my Inbox :mad:

I have some questions for the computer geniuses out there please:

Have I got a virus? If not, how did it do this when I didn't ask it to?

Where have they gone? And can I get them back?

I know I should back up (famous last words) but I confess I don't. And even if I did I probably wouldn't do it every night. Bah.

Any light that can be shed on this greatly appreciated!!!

Dark_Forces

Outlook regularly compacts folders so save space and to speed it up generally.

I think it may have deleted the other emails as they were being compacted and you must have hit cancel midway. Since it was not able to leave the emails in their original state and either compact it they were essentially corrupted therefore they were deleted.

Thats what I think Happenned.

Stompa

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/filecorruption.mspx

Stompa

Binxy

Oh.

Well absolutely *insert expletive here* great.

Thanks, both of you.

Chippy_Minton

Binxy wrote:

I watched it for a few seconds (as it sped through several folders) thinking "Why is it doing this!?" Then I hit "cancel" (Thank gods!) and shut it down. This morning, I switched on the PC to discover it hadn't "compacted" so much as "deleted" - everything contained in the first 6 folders of my Inbox :mad:

If I understand you correctly, you had some subfolders of Inbox. OE doesn't like it when there are subfolders in Inbox or the other standard folders. You should really create your own subfolders under Local Folders. Even so, I would expect clicking Cancel to exit the compaction process cleanly, but maybe this isn't the case if you have Inbox subfolders.

Before you go any further with trying to recover your deleted folders, find your OE Store Folder - Stompa's post tells you how to do this - and copy your Store Folder (and all the .dbx files within it) to somewhere safe, e.g. your Desktop.

Next, are there any .dbx files corresponding to your deleted folders? For example if one of your deleted folders was named MSE, is there a file called MSE.dbx in your Store Folder? If so, there's a good chance of recovering the lost folders by coming out of OE, deleting Folders.dbx and restarting OE. Refer to the Folders.dbx section in that article.