Hello

I have a user with a huge Inbox and folders. When I first saw the message
store it was 10GB in total. I compacted and it came right down. But funny
things happened when I compacted. Sometimes while compacting saw a message
saying a program is using Outlook Express - then I think it skipped
compacting that file. Then strangely say from 15th Nov 2005 to 18th Jan
2006 messages would be missing!

Is it best to 'Go Offline' before compacting? Does this help?

Then something really dreadful happened. The customer wanted to see some
other emails from an old profile. So I imported messages, Import mail from
an OE6 store directory. This started imported 4000 messages. When it had
finished customer said say 'successfully imported message' but then had
problems so closed Outlook Express. It then would not load. I looked in
Task Manager and it seemed to be taking up 400MB of memory - may have read
it incorrectly - but a lot anyway. and eventually it loaded - but there was
nothing in the Inbox. Although I looked at the Inbox and it was 2GB in
size. so I decided to compact to see if that would help - it then became
tiny - actually so tiny that nothing was in it!

Of course the customer is hopping mad and wonders what he pays me for! He
brought me in to fix his problems not cause them! Any ideas on how to
recover the Inbox? Is it even possible?

Is there a limit to the size of the Inbox?

Why am I getting these problems? Bar leaving the country, what can I do?

Angus

"Angus Comber" wrote in message
...
Hello

I have a user with a huge Inbox and folders. When I first saw the message
store it was 10GB in total. I compacted and it came right down. But
funny things happened when I compacted. Sometimes while compacting saw a
message saying a program is using Outlook Express - then I think it
skipped compacting that file. Then strangely say from 15th Nov 2005 to
18th Jan 2006 messages would be missing!

Is it best to 'Go Offline' before compacting? Does this help?

Then something really dreadful happened. The customer wanted to see some
other emails from an old profile. So I imported messages, Import mail
from an OE6 store directory. This started imported 4000 messages. When
it had finished customer said say 'successfully imported message' but then
had problems so closed Outlook Express. It then would not load. I looked
in Task Manager and it seemed to be taking up 400MB of memory - may have
read it incorrectly - but a lot anyway. and eventually it loaded - but
there was nothing in the Inbox. Although I looked at the Inbox and it was
2GB in size. so I decided to compact to see if that would help - it then
became tiny - actually so tiny that nothing was in it!

Of course the customer is hopping mad and wonders what he pays me for! He
brought me in to fix his problems not cause them! Any ideas on how to
recover the Inbox? Is it even possible?

Is there a limit to the size of the Inbox?

Why am I getting these problems? Bar leaving the country, what can I do?

Angus





It's best to not have near 10 gig of messages, I'm suprised OE ran at all.
There is a 2 gig limit on the size of the files and even then, it's not
recommended to get near that.

Check to see if there is a .dbt file in the message stores folder. If it is,
see what size it is, it may still be there that you can use it to recove the
old messages. If not, DBXPress is about it as it will scan the drive for
the old messages to see how many it can find that haven't been overwritten
by the file system. With 10 gig, that might end up taking a week to run.

Tell your customer to archive old messages in other folders and not the
Inbox and then don't let it get to over 1 gig at the most.

Compact only after backing up the message stores folder (should something go
wrong, you have the back up to replace it).