Outlook Express *.dbx

Life Technology
1

Anyone know how to access old Outlook Express *.dbx files?

I’ve lost an important file, it’s in one of those dbx files I backed up, but now I can’t open them.

Help!
Kenneth

2

I hope someone answers that’s better than I am. I went through this a couple years ago and don’t recall the exact path but it was a pain in the arse. I first went in to the control panel and made my hidden files visible. Then I saved a fake outlook record and otherwise fooled around with import/export until I saw the path. It goes through a couple hidden files so if you dont make them visible I dont think you can get to it. I was able to back up my files onto cd which I never could do with import/export. But, as I recall all records are saved to one file so when I restored I couldnt pick and choose which ones I wanted and ended up with a bunch of duplicates. Anyway, that’s all I can help. Enigma

3

Easy one…

The Outlook Express “dbx” files should be located in the following path (under Windows 2000/XP):
Key
[color=red]Red[/color] = replace with applicable name
[color=blue]Blue[/color] = invisible folder; to make invisible files visible, see the post above.

C:\Documents and Settings[color=red]your_user_name[/color][color=blue]LocalSettings[/color][color=blue]Application Data[/color]\Identities[color=red]{22958CFA…blah}[/color]\Microsoft\Outlook Express\

You can probably do import/export in OE to recover those files. Or you can do what I do (backup your dbx files before doing this):

  1. Take a note of the long ass string of numbers under “Identities” that’s already there.
  2. Create another profile under OE. Quite Outlook Express.
  3. Go back to “Identities” path and you will find another long string of numbers created by OE.
  4. Click all the way into “Outlook Express” folder under the new number string. Copy those dbx files you want to recover into this folder.
  5. Restart Outlook Express with the profile you just created.
  6. You should be able to see all the files automagically appear in OE.

I have done this countless times everytime I do a clean install on my computer when I was still using OE. It’s never failed me. If you are copying your dbx files from a CD ROM, make sure you change the permissions to allow yourself full access to the dbx files and unclick “read only” in “Properties”. Good luck.