Getting rid of "outbox" e-mails

[jdb691rx]

My friend phoned me about the following problem. He tried to send a whole block of e-mails from outlook express, all at once.
Now his computer freezes every time he tries to get them to go.
My question is, where does outlook express store those e-mails for him to navigate to them and delete them.

Thanks in advance

Jack

[kram 2.0]

Originally Posted by jdb691rx My friend phoned me about the following problem. He tried to send a whole block of e-mails from outlook express, all at once. Now his computer freezes every time he tries to get them to go. My question is, where does outlook express store those e-mails for him to navigate to them and delete them. Thanks in advance Jack

Do you mean his computer freezes everytime he opens Outlook since it still wants to send the big block of mail at program startup? Disconnect yourself from the internet and log onto Outlook Express and manually delete the contents of the outbox folder. Then reconnect.

kram

[jdb691rx]

Thanks for the swift reply. He has tried that, but it still freezes. He has looked in Programme files \ outlook expresss, but they are not there.


Jack

[Statica]

The easiest way to do it is to first open windows explorer and turn on show all hidden files. (Tools > Folder Options > View > check mark Show hidden files and folders and uncheck Hide extensions for known file types. Click OK)
Now close Outlook Express.
Then do a file search by going to START > Search and look for outbox.dbx
Select each occurence that appears in the search result window. Then Press F2 for rename and rename it to outbox.tmp1 outbox.tmp2 etc etc.
Once you're done, open your Outlook express, the previous outbox should have been deleted and a new empty outbox.dbx will be created.

[jdb691rx]

Many thanks for the help. I will e-mail that to his hotmail address, then phone to say it is there.

Thanks again

Jack

[Digitalic]

Nice tip concerning searching for outbox.tmp, etc. I never realized that Statica

Something that can be done to simplify managing *.dbx files. The .dbx files are deeply nested by default and sometimes even a search won`t find them. Especially mail folders that were created by the account owner. To do this first create a folder somewhere that you will be able to find easily and name it e-mail or something. My Documents is a good place, or the C:\ drive, anywhere you will be able to access easily.

When you open OE, click tools\options\maintenance. Click the "store folders" tab. When you look at the path you will see what I mean about deeply nested. Now click the "change" tab. Navigate to the folder you created and click OK. You will receive a popup telling you that the change will take effect the next time you open OE or something to that effect.

The next time you open OE, you will see a brief window open which indicates the files are being moved. Now you have an easily accessed directory with all of your e-mail folders. It comes in very handy in the event of a re-install. I don`t now if the outbox.tmp files will be stored there because I`ve never had to deal with this but I have a suspicion they might.

[Statica]

Digitalic .. just to clarify, I asked him to search and rename outbox.dbx files to outbox.tmp (instead of deleting it outright).

[Digitalic]

Originally Posted by Statica Digitalic .. just to clarify, I asked him to search and rename outbox.dbx files to outbox.tmp (instead of deleting it outright).

Yes you`re right. I overlooked "Then Press F2 for rename". Thanks for clarifying that. In my haste reading your post I assumed you meant OE appended the .tmp extension when the upload was incomplete. My mistake.

Your method though is effective.

[darkmaninc]

excellent static...