Outlook Express Message Store

[BGBG]

In C\Windows\ApplicationData\Identities\Microsoft\Out lookExpress are notepad .dbx files from Outlook Express. In them are not text but squares and other symbols. Is there supposed to be a way to read these or is this for computers and not people? I was looking for a place where messages sent or deleted might still be stored on computer.

[kelly]

It's all mashed together. Maybe Poconos will chime in here as I know he's working to parse images from OE and can probably shed some light as to how the store is configured.

[Terry Hanushek]

BG

.dbx files are the storage repositories for Outlook Express messages. They are in a format which contains indexing and compression unique to OE. They can be read with Outlook Express. They are not text files and cannot be read with Notepad.

Note that your list of .dbx files in c:\windows\....... relate to the local message folders in OE. Each .dbx file contains all of the messages in the corresponding OE folder.

HTH

Terry

[Poconos]

As Tony said above I've been playing trying to write a VB4, old but it works, program to extract JPEG image files from a DBX file. Did a lot of web searching trying to get a good description of the DBX format but not much info is out there so I've reverted to reverse engineering the mess. More fun that way too. Makes me wonder what sick mind created this stuff. The squares and odd characters you see are simply non-printing characters in a binary file. You can open a WORD or EXCEL document and see the same stuff embedded in places. If you open with WORDPAD or some text editor that can handle humongous files, you can search and find the text of messages you are looking for as OE seems to save TXT files unencoded. If you compact the folders they're gone. As for my goal, I have some network cameras that have the ability to dump email images, one per email. A pain when reviewing. I'd like to extract these and rename to something logical. Almost there. Another monkey wrench in the soup is the cams send the attachment as MIME with BASE64 encoding...bah. Unencoding that is actually pretty easy. Then OE seems to embed carriage returns and linefeeds to limit record lengths and that gets messier. OE has been put on the backburner though. Eudora saves attachments in a separate directory under a unique name so all you have to do is go into the MBX file and decrypt the names and locations of the attachments and work it from there. Lot easier than OE but OE remains a challenge. MS doesn't make anything EASY.
Al

[zlatan24]

I heard about not bad application-extracting .dbx files (http://www.recoverytoolbox.com/dbx_extract.html),
repair mailboxes in Outlook Express format and extract emails, repair messages from all folders and extract .dbx files, even from Deleted Items, can work with very large files of dbx format, works with all Windows operating systems, starting from Windows 98 to Windows Vista.