how do i view my backed up e-mails??

[spiritfire]

about 2 weeks ago, i had a mjor system crash which erased about half the system files from windows 98, so bad infact that windows packed in all together. luckly, i was able to set my HD up as a slave on a friends pc and was able to access it to get my important information etc. i backed up all my mp3's documents, saves etc. onto about 3 cds and then formatted and repartitioned my HD maually. windows 98 now runs perfectly and all my files seemed to transfer from the cd's the the hd fine. for some reason though, i cannot figure out how to view the e-mails i backed up. i was told that all the e-mails were stored in the 'e-mail and news' subdirectory in the windows folder by a techie friend of mine, thus i backed up that directory (i looked in it and all my e-mails seemed to be their in there in a strange file type). now, i have transfered my e-mails back into the same subdirectory in my freshly installed operating system and i cant seem to find a way to view them. ive tryed to use the import e-mail function inside outlook express but it doesnt seem to allow me to pick a folder to get the e-mails from.
i'm really stuck as i really need these e-mails because they contain account info etc.

please, if anyone knows of a solution or can help in anyway, post here..

thanks to you all,

Spirit.

[mairving]

Generally Outlook Express stores messages in c:\Windows\Application Data\indenties. To import the messages, click File/import/messages/Outlook (version no.). Highlight Main Identity and press next. Select browse. Go to the folder that you backed up (hopefully the right one). Press next, then import. This should import your whole inbox, deleted messages and all.

[spiritfire]

it doesn't seem to be working. i did what you said but it says it cant find any mail in the folder when there obveously is.
any ideas??

[mairving]

You may have backed up the wrong folder. Which one was backed up?

If you are getting this message No messages can be found in this folder or another application is running that has the required files open. Please select another folder or try closing the application that may have the files open

You may try this:

Outlook Express 5 expects that those files will be stored in a folder called Mail and it grinds to a halt when they're not.
Rename the folder the files are stored in as Mail (or create a new one named Mail somewhere and copy the files to it) and then repeat the import steps that you described in your letter.
And here's another important item: during the import process, you have to browse to the folder that contains the Mail folder. If you browse to the Mail folder itself, you'll get the same cryptic error message. Thank you very much, Micro-soft.
The Knowledge Base reports a few other situations where OE 5 may balk at importing messages. If you backed up your OE 5 files to a CD-Recordable disk, the files will be read-only, even if you copy them back to a hard disk. OE 5 gives you the same helpful error message you mention when you try to import read-only files. To work around this sterling Microsoft feature, copy the files to a hard disk or other writable device, select them in Explorer, choose File•Properties and un-check Read-only at the bottom of the General tab.

[jmatt]

http://chattanooga.net/~scochran/DBXtract.htm

OE5 has a proprietary binary format that makes archiving
individual messages difficult. In addition, a number of
people have indicated that their message folders have
become corrupted and OE can not read them. Consequently,
they have lost all the messages in that folder.

DBXtract.exe extracts all mail and news messages from
individual dbx files. After extracting the messages one
can drag them from a Windows Explorer folder into an Outlook
Express mail folder.