Repair DBX file in order to repair Outlook Express

The messages in your inbox are gone! Or Outlook Express denies starting up! How do you repair Outlook Express? Here we will try to fix all these strange situations. In Outlook Express, email losses are largely attributed to DBX corruption. Outlook Express stores email messages in databases that have a .dbx file extension. Each Outlook Express folder (even subfolders) has a database associated with it; thus if you have 10 folders, you have 10 databases. The databases have the same name as the folders thus the drafts folder has a database called drafts.dbx. Therefore, we need to repair DBX file in order to repair Outlook Express.

There are possibly two initial ways to repair DBX file database. The first method is the compacting method and the second is transfer method.

Using the Compacting Utility

Try to compact and remove any inconsistency or redundant information within the DBX file by the following steps.

• Click Work Offline on the File menu to terminate any transmission
• In the Folder list, click on Outlook Express to ensure that no email or news folder is opened
  Close the Folder list
• On the File menu, select Folder, and then select Compact All Folders.
• If an error occurs, close Outlook Express, re-open and repeat the process

Transfer Method

This method tries to move all emails from a corrupted folder into a working folder. For this:

• Open Outlook Express and right click on Local Folders and select New Folder
• Type in: backup and hit Enter
• Select all the emails in the corrupted folder [control + A]
• Right click on the highlighted mails and select Move To Folder
• Select the backup folder and click OK
• Delete the corrupted folder and rename the backup folder to the corrupted folder’s name

If you are lucky and Outlook Express is not highly corrupted then you will get back your emails and data. Though, in cases of severe corruption, the folder may not be recognized and displayed. Then you need to repair the corrupted DBX file using 3rd party recovery programs.

Outlook Express Repair is a repair DBX tool with explicit features. It can repair highly damaged DBX files and efficiently recover emails, images, message properties, attachments. The best part, you can even recover deleted data and these are highlighted. It supports Unicode character recovery and even save data in DBX and EML file format. It is compatible with Outlook Express 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0. Have a free trial which is fully functional except that you can only use it to save the first ten files from every selected folder.