Corrupt Outlook Express file in transfer from XP to 10

[carmen617]

Yup, you read it right - I have a client who is finally moving from XP to Windows 10, and transferring about 15 years of email (literally tens of thousands of messages) from Outlook Express to Outlook 2016.

At the time I did the transfer, I was unable to get his XP machine working, so I pulled the drive and found the .dbx files. I actually had trouble finding them, as they were all in MY DOCUMENTS for some reason, no clue why - but I managed to find them, imported them into Windows Live Mail and then exported them to Outlook. All went fine except his Sent Items folder, which was missing the last year or so of sent emails. This is critical to this guy, who runs some sort of a user group and tells me he references his sent emails daily. So we set out to get the XP machine working again so I could export the sent folder directly from Outlook Express.

Success - got the XP machine running again, opened Outlook Express and all his sent files were there for him to reference. So I exported just the sent folder to Exchange. The process showed about 3500 sent emails and took about 45 minutes, way too slow. When I tried to open the resulting PST with Outlook, a message popped up saying the file was corrupt and asked to run ScanPST on it. That tool failed at step 4, with the message that "Outlook cannot repair this file".

So - the guy has his old XP machine up and running and can access the sent mails from there, but really wants them moved to his new machine. Does anybody know of a tool, or an outsourced service, that can repair the DBX file? Believe it or not money is not much of an object, he just wants his emails back.

 

[GTP]

You should reach out to @callthatgirl in this forum.

 

[4ycr]

In live mail are the emails showing on that? have you tried installing live mail on the XP computer and importing them that way?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

There's a few "snake oil" programs/services out there to repair DBX files (I'm sure Google searches will bring some spammers into this thread even, to come link them).

Back in the XP (and earlier) days...with OE, I'd just work with them manually.
OE keeps the mail store deep in the users profile. In OE, you can right click a folder..props...and see the full path right there.
Each folder within OE....is a DBX file. Inbox.dbx, sent.dbx, etc. And ones you manually create...show up there.

I would copy the original primary folder containing all the DBX files to a backup location..just to store a "backup".
Now, create a second "sent" items folder within OE...(like sentbak) and "move" mail in chunks from there. By working through all of the mail doing a copy process, you'll likely weed out the offending/corrupt mail(s).
Flush out those corrupt mails, move the good ones back into that folder.

OE and its DBX files were easily corrupted by intrusive antivirus, or failing hard drives...and when you started storing massive amounts of e-mail in them...the chance of corruption really went sky high.

Once OE can navigate through e-mails fine, the transfer should go smoothly into full Outlook.

How healthy is the hard drive on the source machine? Can try cloning to a better hard drive for this process.

Or you can stick Outlook on the source machine...and export to it from Outlook. Now you'll have a PST you can copy over to the new computer...and move mail from that PST.

You can also get granular...and move 1x folder at a time to a PST and import those folders one at a time into the new Outlook. You don't have to move ALL the mail to a PST. A PST is just a portal file that can contain all the mail, or...individual folders...or individual sub folders...or a few...whatever.

Quite a few different approaches you can use.

 

[carmen617]

There's a few "snake oil" programs/services out there to repair DBX files (I'm sure Google searches will bring some spammers into this thread even, to come link them).

Back in the XP (and earlier) days...with OE, I'd just work with them manually.
OE keeps the mail store deep in the users profile. In OE, you can right click a folder..props...and see the full path right there.
Each folder within OE....is a DBX file. Inbox.dbx, sent.dbx, etc. And ones you manually create...show up there.

I would copy the original primary folder containing all the DBX files to a backup location..just to store a "backup".
Now, create a second "sent" items folder within OE...(like sentbak) and "move" mail in chunks from there. By working through all of the mail doing a copy process, you'll likely weed out the offending/corrupt mail(s).
Flush out those corrupt mails, move the good ones back into that folder.

OE and its DBX files were easily corrupted by intrusive antivirus, or failing hard drives...and when you started storing massive amounts of e-mail in them...the chance of corruption really went sky high.

Once OE can navigate through e-mails fine, the transfer should go smoothly into full Outlook.

How healthy is the hard drive on the source machine? Can try cloning to a better hard drive for this process.

Or you can stick Outlook on the source machine...and export to it from Outlook. Now you'll have a PST you can copy over to the new computer...and move mail from that PST.

You can also get granular...and move 1x folder at a time to a PST and import those folders one at a time into the new Outlook. You don't have to move ALL the mail to a PST. A PST is just a portal file that can contain all the mail, or...individual folders...or individual sub folders...or a few...whatever.

Quite a few different approaches you can use.

Thanks, some good thoughts here. All of the sent mail appears to work fine within OE - the client can navigate through them easily. I have all the DBX files backed up in several places, and have tried importing them several different ways, from several different sources. All "successful" imports have the same results - mails prior to last October seem fine, anything newer just comes in as an envelope with today's date and nothing readable.

Apart from the "sent" emails, everything else moved over fine. The client had literally hundreds of folders and sub folders, all of which he is very attached to, so he's gone through them all. I actually got a phone call from him complaining that he was missing "over 15,000 deleted emails", lol - but fortunately he found those, geeze.

I know where the DBX files are supposed to be stored, but the are not there. Believe me, I can't fathom why a tech would move all the DBX files into My Documents in XP, but I found them by doing a whole drive search after finding the "identities" folder empty. I am coming to this client taking over for his previous tech who died, and there are a lot of things set up very strangely on the system (not to mention that he kept this guy going on XP for so long and didn't explain to him the risks inherent in having years and years and thousands and thousands of emails only stored in Outlook Express). I actually think he may have moved the DBX folders into "My Documents" so that the client could use the backup system he set up for him, which was pointed to his user account. That actually worked - he has the DBX files backed up on an external drive.

I like the idea of trying to copy the missing "sent" items into another folder block by block, and then exporting that, and so will try that next time I'm with the client. If anybody has a non-snake-oil OE file fixer to recommend I'm game for that too.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Huh...customized OE mailbox locations in MyDocs...yeah guess it was to simplify backups. Although it's not hard to tell a backup program just to sweep through docs'nsettings\username\blah blah...OE

Anyhow...yeah after moving the OE DBX's...try exporting to an older version of Office Outlook on the XP rig..and then just transport the PST to the new rig.

 

[carmen617]

Huh...customized OE mailbox locations in MyDocs...yeah guess it was to simplify backups. Although it's not hard to tell a backup program just to sweep through docs'nsettings\username\blah blah...OE

Anyhow...yeah after moving the OE DBX's...try exporting to an older version of Office Outlook on the XP rig..and then just transport the PST to the new rig.

Hmm, good idea. I exported it to Exchange and only tried to open it with the newer Outlook on the 10 machine. He has Outlook 2000 on the XP machine, I'll try opening the PST with that instead.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Hmm, good idea. I exported it to Exchange and only tried to open it with the newer Outlook on the 10 machine. He has Outlook 2000 on the XP machine, I'll try opening the PST with that instead.

Yeah that's fine...there's the old style PSt which the Outlook 2K will use, and then with 2k3 and newer, it supported a new format of PST...which allowed more features and a much larger size. But the newer versions of Outlook are still backwards compatible and can read the older format of PST.

 

[Oscar Vega]

Option1: create a new folder in OE, copy all (or last) mails to this folder, import to Live Mail this new folder.

Option2: create copy of sent folder (for backup), create a folder on desktop and move the mails to this (this create a individual .EML message. Take this tool : https://deconf.com/eml-to-msg-converter-freeware/ . New MSG files easily move to OUTLOOK

 

[Mainstay]

Why not configure an IMAP account and manually "migrate" them to the new account... Once up in GMAIL or whatever, you have them... reconnect to some W10 computer client and you have them.

Tedious, but it works.

 

[johnrobert]

I still have an old laptop with XP for use when clients XP computer wont boot
I always copied OE store to same location on my XP laptop then fire up outlook and let it import mail
then copy over PST to new computer

 

[carmen617]

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. Just as a follow-up, was at the client today to finish this job. Any automated import/export through OE failed, but I managed to get all his sent emails over by copying the individual .eml files in batches to a several folders, then copying those directly into the sent folder in Windows Live Mail, then exporting them to Exchange. Pretty simple solution, although a bit time consuming, but I wouldn't have thought to try it without this string of potential answers. This is a great resource!