everything's dissapeared on outlook express

[Parangles]

Everythings gone- no inbox content, no outbox, no sent , no address book , no settings - nothing ! Its like opening up OE on a brand new computer. I did some maintainance work- on Sat.-defrag , tidied up, but did not empty the recycle bin and there is nothing showing in there that could have been deleted. I can't find anything anywhere.
Where could all the data have gone? This is on a business workstation so its serious.
Any ideas ?? Thanks

[juppy]

Does the machine use McAfee for the antivirus program? If so, you might look here for some info.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=321505
If not, then I don't know what you could try, other than maybe doing a search for files ending in .dbx. OE saves email messages in .dbx files, so if you find some doing a search, you might be able to import them back into OE. Other than that, I don't know anything else to try.

[liambl]

Isn't Outlook data stored in outlook.pst? Thats what I copy to back up my emails if i reinstall.

[EzyStvy]

Did you by any chance create a new windows user?

[Parangles]

Thanks- I found a folder with some back up files by doing a complete search for *.dbx.
and thankfully most all of the inbox was still on the server, so I am building it back.
Question is, what the heck happened ? I restored all the recycle bin but that didnt help so it probably wasn't anything that I trashed. Not McAfee on it, but an old version of Norton
A mystery !

Thanks again.

[Bob338]

I'm usually the one asking for help here, but I had much the same problem. Read this link.

http://www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx#5

Seems to be shortage of memory that causes this, at least in my case. It recurs from time to time and freeing memory seems to cure things.

[EzyStvy]

The "Compact Folder" function has been known to kill the dbx files....

[juppy]

Originally Posted by liambl Isn't Outlook data stored in outlook.pst? Thats what I copy to back up my emails if i reinstall.

Are you talking about the office program Outlook? Because this is Outlook Express (just the email part of it). I don't really know how the full Outlook program saves it's files.....Express saves them as files ending in .dbx though.

Glad you were able to find those files, Parangles. A couple things that might cause that have already been mentioned, but one that I found that seemed pretty weird to me was letting the folders get "too big"......in other words, never throwing any messages away, but rather just storing them all. Several things I found said OE has been known to sorta crash when trying to handle too many messages. If I remember, I think it said the limit was like 2 Gig, but if you're the packrat type, it doesn't take long for those to add up, especially if they have things like movie attachments in them. Dunno if that's what happened though....might just be one of those freaky things that can't be explained.

[Parangles]

" Bob338 I'm usually the one asking for help here >"

Very usefull article- Memory must have been the problem.
There was 383 Mb of messages ! With huge html attachments
nowadays, especially in spam, we need to be alert to this.
I have cleaned up everybody on the network,
and will have to remember to do so regularly.
Thanks