Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Outlook Express Identity problems

I have seen this problem several times. Outlook Express allows you to set up unique identities so that more than one person can use the same program to check their email. Unfortunately, if one of the identity files becomes corrupt, you can lose all of your email.
Microsoft makes it extremely difficult for a novice to backup their email. Where is my email? Where indeed. It is buried away in the hidden application support folder and named using a long, incoherent, alphanumeric code. It is very infuriating, even for a power user. There are many sites that offer methods of backing up your Outlook Express mail, but if an identity becomes corrupt, you will never make it past the second step of the process. The best you will be able to do is open another mail program and import the primary identity. That's it. One identity.
So this advice is purely to prevent the problem. Stop using Outlook Express immediately. It is great when it works, but when it breaks, your mail is most likely gone. An expert can get it back, but it will cost you. Upgrade to Outlook. Too bad they couldn't come up with a better name, but the "non-express" version is the best way to go. The biggest advantage is that it is better at exporting your mail to a .pst file. Store this on a CD or removable drive. As for identities. Stop using them. Instead, learn how to set-up a new user on your computer. Then, when you want to switch identities, simply switch users instead. This gives each user their own computer, documents folder, music folder, etc. The Outlook Express identity system is a shortcut, and a bad one.
If you insist on using Outlook Express for multiple users, do it by creating new users in the control panel. Not identities. This way, each user can use their own copy of Outlook Express. One identity file. Fewer problems.

2 comments:

Alex said...

Yesterday I created a new folder in my OE,and unexpectedly all my mails were deleted.After that to me came friend and accidentally told about-view .dbx files.As he said tool is free and it helped him in like condition.Besides that as he said utility can farther attempts to retrieve messages and save restored emails to your HDD or any other removable media.

Alexis said...

I was in net yesterday and saw there-dbx file repair tool.Tool was good to my mind.And I remembered about my friend,which said about his problem.And I understood that this was much ado about nothing.Because this tool solved his problems in seconds and for free.