Best way to fix corrupted Inbox for Outlook 5.0

Best way to fix corrupted Inbox for Outlook 5.0 - emails gone

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OutlookGuy - 09 Jan 2008 02:05 GMT

I'm running Outlook Express 5.5 on a Windows NT (2000) platform. Yesterday
Outlook froze up while I was receiving emails to my inbox, I had to manually
shut it down via the task manager. When I restarted Outlook, it gave me an
error message and wouldn't receive incoming mail. All of the files in my
inbox also wouldn't display.

I still have a 2 GB inbox.dbx file stored, so I'm guessing it was corrupted.
I made a backup copy to an external drive, cut and pasted the original .dbx
file from the Outlook folder to another place on my PC, and attempted to
extract the files using the free Macallan tool. Apparently it didn't work.
I keep reading that using Outlook's compact feature will only make the
problem worse. Is there a good tool out there for me to extract the files
from my inbox.dbx file and restore my inbox?

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Michael Santovec - 09 Jan 2008 21:56 GMT

2 GB is the design limit for a DBX file. Once you hit that OE can't
handle the file at all.

The following programs (all by the same author) have had good success
extracting messages although there's no guarantee that they will get all
the messages.
DBXtract - http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx
DBXpress - http://www.oehelp.com/DBXpress/Default.aspx
DBXtend - http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtend/Default.aspx
Note that the cheapest of the programs can take DAYS to process or large
DBX file.

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Mike - http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/techhelp.htm

> I'm running Outlook Express 5.5 on a Windows NT (2000) platform.
> Yesterday
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
> files
> from my inbox.dbx file and restore my inbox?

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OutlookGuy - 09 Jan 2008 22:55 GMT

Thanks for the suggestion.

I wish I would have known that before hitting the 2GB mark. So is
extraction the only fix? There's no way I can randomly delete some emails
from the inbox dbx file in order to get it to load as normal?

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Frank Saunders MS-MVP IE,OE/WM - 09 Jan 2008 23:02 GMT

> Thanks for the suggestion.
>
> I wish I would have known that before hitting the 2GB mark. So is
> extraction the only fix? There's no way I can randomly delete some emails
> from the inbox dbx file in order to get it to load as normal?

Nope.

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Frank Saunders MS-MVP IE,OE/WM
www.fjsmjs.com
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