This new trick Outlook Express has learned has hit my system tthree times so far. The first time I lost some business traffic that was already handled so it wasn't a major hit. The second time, I managed to find the folders in the 'Deleted' bin and was able to retrieve them without difficulty. I then started backing up my mail folders to a protected area on a second drive. Good thing I did, because I lost folders a third time and had to recover from the backup. I have a some Rules that route the incoming mail to those folders and they are still in place. The data loss is complete and the messages and folders are deleted completely from the system. There was no delete command entered via the keyboard.

I am running XP Pro SP2 that is current and up to date as far as MS updates are concerned.

MS wanted to charge me $35 for the 'privalege of submitting the problem to them.

Any ideas or suggestions, guys? Oh ueah, the default installed folders are fine. Just the ones I built are being deleted (max of 3).

This post has been edited by HandiComp: Sep 29 2006, 11:59 PM

here is what microsoft has to say, you may have to reinstall outlook press. This won't recover your data, but will at least stabilize outlook express.

You might consider switching to thunderbird as an alternative.

were these files stored as mdx (default OE files) or did you have them in a personal folder (pst) format.

Microsoft is full of beans. First of all, this is a fresh install of Outlook Express (actually XP SP2, as well) with all updates installed and secondly, I'm using the default storage location and file ext.

Prior to the big update push from July, I had no problem with Express. After that, I had ActiveX Control problems and a Trojan backdoor attack. I had to reinstall from scratch to clear all that away. Up until then, the system had operated for 7 years without needing to be rebuilt. Something of a record.

I use Eudora for the really important business email account, I haven't had all that much luck with Thunderbird. It can get rather quirky at times. Pegasus isn't in consideration, either.

ok, I provided the MS page because it is a good starting point and lists everything to try. In other words is a good basic guide.

There are a handfull of utilities that you can try to repair a damaged oe mail store. I have had mixed results. Here is one for example: http://www.scandbx.com/

I am not recomending any one over another. Best that you look around and see if you want to spend money on a 50/50 shot at recovering the lost mail.

If you do a lot of business email, then I would suggest Microsoft Outlook. Besides being a full personal informtion manager, it allows you to store email in pst format. Much more reliable than dbx format.

Starjax;

Good point. As I stated I use a backup app to keep daily incremental backup of all emails (and other things) so recovering things isn't that much of a problem. It just grates on my nerves to lose an entire folder of email. It's bad enough to lose it because of 'user error' but to have it happen 'just because' gets to you after a while. Plus, I don't always have time to restore things until I close up for the day.

By the way, I use Genie Backup Manager and it does both backup AND restore very nicely.

Anyway, if I didn't need multi-account email support, I would be happy with Eudora and Outlook (and Express) would sit empty. But since the array of clients that will handle multiple accouts is extremely limited, I don't have much choice on the windows platform. On Linux, I have Evolution and a few additional ones but I'm not scheduled to shift ops to Linux until XP goes 'unsupported', which looks to be rather soon since XP SP1 is being dropped this month. I won't be moving to Vista!

This post has been edited by HandiComp: Oct 5 2006, 06:19 PM

evolution is pretty cool. I used to know one of the programers for it, but she moved on a while back. I like the fact that they allow an exchange connector. Great for corp. environment where they use exchange for the mail servers.

I would highly encourage you to install sp2 if you want to keep xp. There are lots of reasons to have it and I can't think of any to not to install it. That might fix some of the issues you have. Then again it sounds like you want to move to linux anyway.

have a distro in mind?

Starjax;

Distro? There are a couple that I really like. SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10.1 is my first choice for a windows replacement. For a system that I'd use for more technical uses, Fedora Core 5. FC 6 is coming out soon and I may decide in favor of it.

Mind you, I've been working with Linux since Slackware 1.x (1994) and UNIX since 1990 so I have experience working with it. I'm one of those guys that installs Gentoo for fun!

I've tried Linspire, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Mandriva, Debian, and others. All good distros, but SUSE actually 'felt' right when I installed it. Therefore, that will be the replacement for Windows.

One nice thing about Linux, though. Every new release for most distros have features that are improved upon. It isn't 'vaporware', promised features are implemented, security 'holes' fixed. You can't say that for ANY MS Windows product including Vista! I suppose that's because it's what you get from an outfit that's more interested in Marketing than actually producing a high quality product.

I use XP SP2 daily only because it's necessary to what I do. When XP SP2 finally bites the dust, my workload will change significantly and I will be using Linux 100% instead of 60%.

One last thing. I am still running my old 486 DX100 system with FC5! Something else you can't do with XP!

BTW: handicomp is short for The Handicapped Computerist.

suse does a lot with thier packages. I know a lot of people who have switched to it because it supports the hardware they have and works well for what they want to do. "just feels right" I would certainly agree with.