OE - "Sent Items" box empty

[nedah]

My OS is Windows XP Home, and e-mail is Outlook Express v.6.0. I am not on a network.

When I opened Outlook Express this afternoon to check the wording of an e-mail I sent yesterday, my “Sent Items” box was completely empty except for a single e-mail I sent earlier to-day. There is nothing in the “Deleted Folder” nor in the “Recycle Bin”. The “Inbox” is perfectly OK.

There were not many messages in the “Sent Items” box – perhaps no more than 80 and each message would normally be only a few lines of text – so no reason for compacting or similar activity (free space on my hard drive is 100GB)

I have managed to locate a folder called Outlook Express which has a file “Sent Items” size 137KB in .dbx format. This folder, which also contains other Outlook Express folders, is buried down a very long path.

Attempts to open the file have been thwarted because each time Adobe Acrobat starts and states that the format is not supported!!

I am tempted, if possible, to copy and paste that file into my “Sent Items” box in OE but before doing so thought I would see if anyone had any other suggestions for recovering access to my Sent Items.

Thanks for any advice.

[Paul Komski]

Sent Items.dbx is the underlying file represented by a Sent Items folder inside the OE GUI (graphical user interface).

There will be one such file/folder for every OE identity on your system.

The utility dbxtract (http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx) can be used to extract messages from such files/folders - often even after they have been corrupted for whatever reason.

To create a brand new Sent Items folder close OE and then find the Sent Items.dbx file and rename it Sent Items Old.dbx. A brand new file&folder will be created when you next open OE. The Sent Items Old.dbx can always be renamed back again if you wish to re-access it and you should still be able to access it with dbxtract if you want.

I don't understand where Adobe Acrobat comes into this??

[nedah]

Paul

Thanks for the advice.

I am as puzzled as you to know how Adobe Acrobat got into the act. When I found the file Sent Items.dbx I clicked it hoping that it would open into Notepad or something similar. However all I could get was Adobe Acrobat. It looks as though the file has been corrupted in some way.

Thanks again for your help.

[nedah]

Paul

Thought you might be interested to know I have discovered the reason for losing my “Sent Items”. That’s the “good” news! The bad news is that the missing items are irrecoverable. The reason for the loss? My own fault. I had a “senior moment” and pressed the wrong key!!

It has always been my practice to manually delete old temporary files and internet flotsam etc. However about 10 days ago I decide to use, for the first time, a clean-up programme called “QuickClean”, which I had received bundled with some other software and which had been sitting unused on my computer for about a year. Unfortunately I failed to notice that among the default group of files to be cleaned was the “Sent Items” folder.!!

However thanks to the link you gave me and the other links from that site I now know a lot more about the fallibility of OE “Sent Items” even without my “senior moment”

Thanks again.