HELP please -DBX file corrupt in Outlook Express 6

[M@H]

HI Chaps,

Could anyone give me some pointers here please. This morning Outlook Express (OE) froze up and crashed. On restarting the application, my Inbox went from 2500 messages to 0.

I immediately closed OE and made a backup copy of Inbox.dbx (which is around 600mb). On opeining up the application again, a few emails arrived, bringing the inbox to 5 messages in total, but the filesize is still over 600mb.

I have tried the old trick of creating a new blank folder, then renaming the inbox.dbx file to match it, and also deleting folders.dbx so it had to re-build the index, none of which has worked.

I have got an eval copy of OE-Mail Recovery which will kindly show me that all my emails are still intact in the file, however this trial version will not let me extract them and save them again.

All other utilities such as Advanced Outlook Repair/Recover do not find the missing emails at all.

Can anyone help me out with a method to re-validate/fix the .dbx file, or a point me at a free utility that will let me get the emails out of the file again in bulk.

Many thanks in advance,
Matt

>>> Edited by M@H on Monday 7th June 16:44

[SoftwareSorcerer]

Will www.mailnavigator.com/ see the emails?

[SoftwareSorcerer]

And another one which one of our chaps has used:

www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/

[M@H]

Hi,

Mailnavigator won't handle a file over 250 megs so my 600 meg file just crashes it. OE DBExtract only looks for specific emails based on their title etc so won't to a bulk export of all the messages (although it can see them), and won't take wildcards in the header field either to speed the process up I'm afraid.

Thanks for the thoughts though ..

Cheers
Matt.