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just began using Vista Home Premium and Outlook on a new computer. My old emails from the old machine were saved to disc and when I attempted to access them, they will not open. They are listed as DBX files. Is there an easy way for me to view and save these? Your help is super-appreciated.
Search for a program called "Dbxtract". It will "extract" every single mail item so you can save them as email or text files.
I think the .dbx format is documented somewhere on MSDN. A few months ago I was trying to save an Outlook Express mailbox as separate messages, and after digging around with Google and DejaNews I found a couple of free tools that did just that. They weren't very stable, though: one didn't seem to work at all, and the other stopped processing messages halfway through the mailbox. In the source code of one of them (I can't remember names, sorry) the .dbx format was obvious. There's also a C library for Unix out there
that reads .dbx files, but I didn't play with that.
In the end I did the slacker thing: I used Outlook to import the .dbx file. Outlook can save a bunch of selected messages as individual text files, which is what I wanted.
For this targets try - 'reading DBX files' http://www.oemailrecovery.com/reading-dbx-files.html
This tool can allows you to open .dbx files, read dbx files and restore your damaged Outlook Express data, recovers corrupted emails and news messages and saves them in format that can be easily read by any email client, powerful software for read .dbx files (opening Outlook Express dbx files) and retrieving information in the popular mail program - Outlook Express, open dbx files (opening Outlook Express dbx files) makes it easy to recover messages from broken dbx files (the files used by Outlook Express to store mail).
Copy the DBX files to a directory on the hard drive of your Vista computer, then make sure they are read-write instead of readonly before telling Windows Mail to import the whole directory containing them. A directory you create for this purpose under your Documents directory is a good choice.