Number 223 - December 2001

MSN Email and Outlook Express
by Carl Tenning, Tacoma Open Group for Microcomputers
My MSN POP3 email stopped working again. I could send, but not receive email through my MSN account. The last time I had this problem, over a week passed before I realized there even was a problem. I usually get at least one email every day, even if it is only spam. In the first instance of this problem, there was no indication to the sender that I was not receiving their email. The solution at that time was to rename 'Inbox.dbx' as 'Inbox.bak' and let Outlook Express rebuild a new inbox file (September 2001 TOGGLE).     However, this time there was an indication to the senders. They received a message from the postmaster that my hard drive was full. I verified this by sending an email from my hotmail account to my MSN account. This time, simply renaming the 'Inbox.dbx' file was not enough, as people still got the 'disk full' message. First I moved all of the messages in my Inbox, to another folder. [This is done within Outlook Express.] But even then, with no messages shown in my Inbox, the Inbox.dbx file was still over 5Mb. The 'Sent Items.dbx' file was over 32Mb.     I had to remove the entire directory containing my email, which is 'C:\Windows\ Application Data\ Microsoft\ Outlook Express.	Actually I saved it to a zip disk, just in case I needed to restore things. In fact, it took two zip disks. Then after restarting Outlook Express, it regenerated the folder with empty files. Fortunately there was no loss of my address book or incoming mail rules.     Before attacking this problem myself, I had a lengthy on-line (typed) conversation with MSN technical support. Their conclusion was that it must be a temporary network problem. What surprises me is that they do not seem to be aware of this problem in Outlook Express. My guess is that email messages are stored in Outlook Express in a data base file format and that somehow the file got corrupted. Remember how dBase II files got corrupted in C/PM? Well, maybe you don't, but what happened was that the end of record marker got misplaced and that really screwed up getting data before that point in the file. Judging by the rather large file sizes in the Outlook Express data directory with seemingly little or no data in the file, this may have been the problem.     How come I have never heard of anyone else with this problem? Maybe this article will help.
Number 223 - December 2001