Cannot open Outlook Express 5

[mnongkhlaw]

Dear all,

When I try to open OE5, it gives 2 alert boxes :-

Alert Box 1 :

Outlook Express could not be started. The application was unable to open the Outlook Express message store. Your computer may be out of memory or your disk is full. Contact Microsoft support for further assistance (0x80040154,183)

Alert Box 2 :

Outlook Express could not be started because MSOE.DLL could not be initialized. Outlook Express may not be installed correctly.

This occurred on the morning of yesterday. The day before, it was OK. Moreover, I had to reinstall IE and some of the shortcuts in my desktop do not work anymore. I've got 300+ mails stored in OE. How do I recover these? Please help.

Mark
(mark@shillong.meg.nic.in)

 

[joegz]

Sounds like your .dbx files are marked as READ ONLY. Check if the attribute was enabled and remove it if it exists.

joegz
"Sometimes you just need to find out what it's not first to figure out what it is."

 

[PennyB]

The .dbx files are stored in (for 2000)
C:/documents and settings/your username/local settings/application data/identities/id number/microsoft/outlook express

Keep going down , basically.

In windows 95 they're in:
C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Identities\id number\Microsoft\Outlook Express
HTH

Penny

 

[mnongkhlaw]

Thanks, joegz & PennyB.

I checked. They all have the Archive attribute set, but not ReadOnly.

Please note that it seems that I was running out of disk space on both C and D partitions before this happened. I had to reinstall IE and some of the shortcuts in my desktop do not work anymore, unless I right-click these and click on Properties-Shortcut tab-Find Target and double click the target. I've got 300+ mails stored in OE. How do I recover these? Can I transfer the mails to another machine on the LAN? If yes, kindly explain how.

Mark.

 

[shmoes]

if you copy the complete folder to another harddrive, you can import from a store directory, you cannot import from a network dir, so you have to copy it first.


File > import >messages > outlook express 5/6 > Import mail from an OEx store directory. Browse to where you've stored it. import either all or selected.. and you're good to go.

BE WARNED, outlook express does NOT warn you if you do not have enough hard drive space to complete the import. It will just create a bunch of 0kb files and say operation complete. So make sure you have more space then the store folder. I've made that mistake and deleted my backup store folder after and lost a lot of emails because of it.


OTherwise it's pretty simple to do.

Good luck

 

[mnongkhlaw]

Thanks Shmoes. That worked for 2 usernames (using OE6 store directory). For the username for which I actually wanted to retrieve the mails, it showed that import was sucessful quite instantaneously, but when I tried to check Inbox, SentMail etc, they are all empty. Do you think my store directory is corrupt? Is there any other way to retrieve my mails? Please help!

Mark.