deleted emails

[Tranquil]

I have accidently deleted several emails from outlook express 6, i have also deleted them from the deleted items folder. I was wondering if there was a way to recover them or if there is a free program that will do it? Thank you.

[PCGeek]

Have not tested this but it's a free download and works for the first three recoveries before you need to register. Should give you enough goes to see if you can recover those files :-

http://www.tucows.com/preview/336229.html

Hope it helps.

Jeff

[Tranquil]

That program works very well, but i was hoping for something that can do more than 3, thank you for the help and if you or anyone knows of anything else that could assist me that would be swell.

[Paul Komski]

The one thing to ensure is that you don't compact any folders. Deleted mails are in fact just marked as deleted and then no longer show up in OE - but the material doesn't actually get removed until the folder is compacted. This is related to the way a mail client can remember that it has already downloaded mails when these are left in existence on the mail server; they dont keep getting downloaded again and again.

Depending on what and how much you want to recover there would be a number of approaches. By just opening the underlying dbx files with notepad you would be able to read all the text - a bit messy maybe but free. Other stuff (binary material such as attachents and pictures) that was included or embedded in the mails will appear as gobbledy-gook and that is where 3rd party utilities really come into their own - translating them back into something that we can see or read once more.

DBxtract http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx used to be free but I now see it costs $5. My guess is that if you do a bit of serious searching you should find a number of utilities which would dig out this sort of material for you - since the recovery is not all that difficult once one knows the various algorithms.