Recover emails and address book from Outlook Express (when didn't export originally)

HELP!!!

I built my friend's dad a computer, taking his old one apart and recycling the case. Before I took his old machine apart I asked him if he was SURE he had everything off the drive that he needed, and he advised he was sure...

...However when I built the new machine he said he needs all his emails off the old harddrive (he never exported them anywhere, same with his address book)

Frustrating I thought, but I have a Harddisk enclosure caddy thing, so I thought I could just hook the drive up as a mass storage device and import them from his original drive.

I can access his orginal drive and all his "application data" which is where I presume they were kept, I tried copying over some of the app data for outlook to see if that would work (it didn't) I found 4 eml files on the drive and tried to import them to outlook on new machine, (didn't work) and I tried running outlook from the old drive, but it just fires up outlook on new machine with no emails or address book.

I am thinking they must be stored somewhere on that drive and surely there is a way to access/import them without having to rebuild his old machine from scratch, just so I can boot up windows and then export them in order to import them???

Anyone know a way????

Thanks!!!!!!!!

 

Re: Recover emails and address book from Outlook Express (when didn't export original

oe is crap program to try and recover emails from. that being said what will he use as his new client? once we know that we can try to figure out how to get them

 

Re: Recover emails and address book from Outlook Express (when didn't export original

He is using the same version of Outlook Express 6, I basically installed his copy of windows XP on the new machine, he hasn't got Vista so hopefully this should make it easier?

 

Re: Recover emails and address book from Outlook Express (when didn't export original

It's pretty simple...this is one way of doing it.

Using Explorer find the OE store folder on the new PC's hard drive (HD) by searching for *.dbx. It will be the folder that has inbox.dbx, sent items.dbx, drafts.dbx, etc., in it and unless he moved the store folder to a different location it should be in either
C:\Windows\Application Data\Outlook Express\{GUID}
or
C:\Documents and Settings\<User>\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express, where {GUID} is a unique, long, aphanumeric construct like {DC40B654-6026-4B52-AAF7-9998CE175EAF}

Now do the same search for *.dbx on the old HD. Copy all the .dbx files from the old HD folder to the new HD folder, overwriting the default .dbx folders on the new HD. Note that if there are new emails on the new HD, that overwriting will delete those, so if they are important, they should be exported to files before overwriting them. I don't know of a way to merge the two sets of files, but someone else on here might know. Note that it's important that folders.dbx be imported, too, as that contains the folder structure for the emails.

The address book is a little trickier, but it's easier if the same user account name exists on both hard drives.

You can do the same search for *.wab on both drives to find the address book(s). There will be a .wab file for each user and sometimes more than one at different locations. Use the one with the newest date on it, which should be the one that's named <user>.wab, where <user> is his user name on the old HD. Put the desired .wab file from the old HD into the corresponding location on the new HD if it's the same windows user account name, otherwise into the corresponding location of the new user account name, as in

C:\Documents and Settings\<usernameold>\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book or
C:\Documents and Settings\<usernamenew>\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book

The *.wab files are standalone files and can be accessed by double-clicking on them. That way you can see which is the one that he needs. If there is more than one, some may be empty. On my system the empty ones are 173KB.

Good luck!

 

Re: Recover emails and address book from Outlook Express (when didn't export original

Thanks for that! Not tried it yet, but I appreciate the clear instructions and this sounds like it will work!

I found the DBX files before but what I did was copy them to desktop then try and import them which did not work.

...and that's very useful giving me the size of the empty wab file thanks will save me a job trawling through. I did double click on one and there was nothing in it, he may not have saved any addresses but I will have to look into it.

Thanks

 

Re: Recover emails and address book from Outlook Express (when didn't export original

You're welcome....I could have been a little clearer, though. There's no importing involved---it's just copying the dbx files into the place that OE expects to find them. (You can really put them anywhere, then in OE just change the path to the store location. I have several store locations and just switch between them in OE to find things.) Anyway, once you've copied the dbx files over to the default store location, opening OE should show the files.