It is not seldom that ten or more messages have been send back and forth each containing duplicate content from previous emails. Microsoft’s Outlook Thread Compressor has been designed specifically to reduce the size of the Outlook mailboxes by removing unnecessary emails from a thread. That’s right, the tool will delete emails in Outlook. This leads to a very important word of caution: It is advised to create a backup of the Microsoft Outlook email folder before you start using the program. While it has been designed and tested carefully one cannot be cautious enough when it comes to programs like this.

There are a few rules that will keep Outlook Thread Compressor (via Technospot) from deleting mails. It will ignore emails containing attachments as it does not come with the means to compare the attachments as well. Another limitation is that it is only effective on internal mail as it uses the conversation threading properties that are preserved for Outlook Exchange messages.

The user can select an Outlook folder that should be processed by the program. The mails can be moved to another folder instead of being deleted right away which is another way of testing the program’s functionality. A list of exceptions can be filled to have certain email messages never deleted by the Outlook compression program.

Installation is a bit complex and requires administrator privileges. It is outlined at the program’s homepage. The program – although not actively developed for more than six years works with all versions of Microsoft Outlook that have been released after Windows 2000. It is also compatible with both Windows Vista and Windows 7.

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UnDBX is a command line utility that can extract the email messages found in Microsoft Outlook dbx files. It extracts them into the more versatile eml format which can then be accessed and viewed in text editors or email clients. The eml format is more widely supported which means it can also be opened (or imported) in various email clients.

The command to extract dbx files is undbx DBX-DIRECTORY OUTPUT-DIRECTORY. The program will automatically extract email messages of all dbx files in the selected directory. The developer added a vbs script (Visual Basic) that offers a graphical user interface for the same process. It will display a file browser that can be used to selected the source directory that has to contain the dbx files and a destination directory for the eml files.

UnDBX is a small command line tool that can be useful in certain situations. The developer has created it to facilitate fast incremental backups of .dbx files. Other tools that might be of interested are the Outlook Express Message Extractor and the Windows Live Mail And Microsoft Outlook Mail Viewer.

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These Outlook email attachments are then displayed in the usual table format that Nirsoft uses in most of their software programs which gives the user options to sort the data in all possible ways. The information that are extracted from the Outlook emails are the filename of the email attachment, the recipient, file size and data of creation among other values.

Email attachments can be selected by the user to retrieve additional information about them. It is possible to save email attachments by selecting them and clicking on the Save selected items button in the software program. It is furthermore possible to delete selected email attachments directly in the software as well. This could be a handy way of copying email attachments from Outlook to another hard drive to free up some disk space.

The list of email attachments that has been found can be exported into various formats including text, html and xml. A few command line parameters are available to export the email attachments directly. There is however no way to access the Microsoft Outlook attachments of another user of the computer system.

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The email recovery software will post a list of all available hard drives at the beginning of which the user can select one that should be crawled for deleted emails. The scan of the hard drive depends largely on its size and the available resources. The email recovery application will display the progress at the top of the window including the emails that have been found so far.

The emails can be accessed right away even if the scan of the hard drive is still underway which is excellent if time is of essence. It can happen that the preview of some of the recovered emails is not shown at all or only partially which means that this email is not recoverable completely.

Emails that have been discovered during the scan can not only be previewed but also exported as a txt or eml document. The txt documents are more easily accessible while the eml format can be used to import the emails into email programs like Microsoft Outlook but also Mozilla Thunderbird and others.

It has to be noted that Mail Cure will not only find Outlook Express email messages but also other email messages. A test on a computer that never made use of Outlook Express but Mozilla Thunderbird resulted in thousands of mail messages that have been found after the scan.

The emails can be sorted in various ways including by sender, date or subject. It is furthermore possible to search for text in all emails that have been found so far. Mail Cure is an excellent email recovery software. Its portable nature makes it an ideal companion for a portable tool collection.

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Only compressing the folders will delete that email permanently from the computer system. That’s great if you deleted an email by accident and want to recover it but bad if an unauthorized third party tries to read your emails.

Microsoft Outlook provides the means to compress a folder immediately but no option to automate the task. It will however display a popup every 100th time that Outlook got closed asking if the user wants to compress the folders.

A far better solution to force Outlook to delete deleted mails completely at every shutdown is to change a setting in the Windows Registry.

Open the Windows Registry by pressing [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [enter]. Navigate to the following Registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office

The next step depends on the version of Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office that is installed on the computer. When in doubt perform the operation for all of the following subkeys.

Find the 9.0, 10.0, 11.0 or 12.0 keys in that folder. Click in the Outlook subkey and locate the key PST. If PST is not existing create it. A full Registry path to the right location could look like this:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\PST\

Only the 12.0 can change in the path. If you are in the PST key right-click in the right pane and select New > DWord.

Name the Dword PSTNullFreeOnClose. Double-click it afterwards and give it the value 1 to enable it. This ensures that Microsoft Outlook will remove deleted mails completely on every exit from the computer system.

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Add to that support for the generic eml mail format and you got a viewer that can view pretty much any mail format that has been used by Microsoft in its mail programs. The software program will display a wizard aiding the user in locating and opening one of the mail databases.

It should be noted that the program is only able to open mail databases from the logged in user. The only other option is to open eml files which work by pasting a path into the application.

The only possible way to display the emails from another user is to export those mails into the eml format so that they can be opened with mail viewer. That’s not really practicable as it would probably be easier to import those mails directly into a portable email client.

Mail Viewer can display all email messages in detailed view including attachments with the option to save those and html preview & printing options. Selected messages can be saved to the eml format. This makes Mail Viewer interesting for users who want to export selected mails from a large Windows Live Mail or Microsoft Outlook email database.

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NK2View is a Nirsoft application that can be used to manage those stored auto complete entries in Microsoft Outlook. The software program is fully portable and should run on most versions and editions of Microsoft Windows. The name of the software is directly related to the file extension of the auto complete entries. Outlook stores them in .n2k files that are named after the profile name.

It displays the auto complete entries of the default Outlook profile by default with an option to load the auto complete entries of other profiles as well. Once loaded the software program lists information such as the email address, display name, the auto complete value or the type.

The auto complete entries can be edited and deleted which is useful for removing obsolete or incorrect entries from the auto complete file.

Users with multiple computers will like the option to export the entries into xml, html or txt format. The software program for Microsoft Outlook does come with another interesting option. It can be used to add information from the Microsoft Outlook address book to the auto complete entries.

Users should be aware that the auto complete limit is 1000 entries. They should backup the .n2k files before they make any chances to the files.

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Outlook Express Password Recovery by Passcape (via Techmixer) is able to recover all saved passwords in Outlook Express including smtp, pop3 and imap passwords. It does that by either decrypting the passwords or revealing the real chars behind asterisks depending on the menu in Microsoft Outlook Express.

It can even decrypt passwords directly from the ntuser.dat file which is handy if only the files but not the installation can be accessed.

The password recovery software is compatible to Microsoft Outlook Express 4-6 and can be installed on most Windows operating systems starting with Windows 95 including Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. Passwords can be exported in text, Microsoft Excel and html files.

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Is your outlook mailbox a mess? Do you miss reading important emails because of the tons of emails you receive on your inbox? Do you want to organize it in such a way that you move a group of emails automatically upon receiving? If you are someone like me who receives more than a couple of hundred emails per day then this tutorial is for you!

Keeping an organized Outlook mailbox is easy by applying rules. In Outlook you can do many things like “move to a specific folder”, “auto delete” and “auto reply”.

Say you want to move an email coming from a specific sender out of your inbox and put it on a separate folder, here are the simple steps:

Note: On this tutorial I will move all emails coming from “Investopedia Forex” to a new “Investopedia Forex” folder.

1. In your Inbox right click the email and choose Create Rule…

2. The “Create Rule” window should appear and you will choose from several options. Since in this case we want to move all emails coming from “Investopedia Forex” we will check the boxes From Investopedia Forex and Move e-mail to folder and then click Select Folder…

3. On the Select Folder window click New… to create a new folder (you will not have to do this step if the folder is already existing)

4. Enter the folder name, in this case “Investopedia Forex” (note: the name of the folder is based from your preference, just make sure that the folder name is something you easily remember.

Once you click “OK” on Create New Folder you will see that folder inside your mailbox.

5. Select that folder and click “OK”:

6. Once you choose the folder, click OK to save the rule.

That’s it! Once I receive an email from “Investopedia Forex” it will move to its Investopedia Forex folder.

7. Optional: If you want to run the rule on messages on the current Inbox folder, check this option and click OK.

You can do the steps above to organize your own inbox. Some of the tips I share often is to move important emails from important people to their own folder. This way you can easily keep track of their emails. You can also do a rule that plays music (i.e. like a ringtone) when you receive an email from anyone you want.

With effective Outlook rules you can organize your mailbox more efficiently. This time you won’t miss that important email again.

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Email Recovery can do that. It can analyze dbx files to recover as many emails as possible from the file. Each recovered email will be saved in the eml format which can be imported back into Microsoft Outlook Express and most other email clients. The analysis is done in a read-only mode which means that the dbx files will be read but not edited or changed in any way.

The recovery software scans the entire dbx file and not only the mail headers to find out if a mail can be recovered. Cautious users can still create a backup of the dbx file and try to restore the emails after creating the backup.

Email Recovery is a handy tool if emails cannot be read anymore or have been deleted accidentally. It can only recover deleted emails if the folders have not been compressed.

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All email clients that I know support eml files which makes it a breeze to import mails of all Outlook Express users into another mail client. In the case of Thunderbird the extension ImportExportTools is required to import the eml files.

The Outlook Express Message Extractor [link] is a small utility that can convert a source Outlook Express dbx file into an eml file. The application supports drag and drop and directory browsing. EML files are Outlook Express Electronic Mail files by the way.

The process will extract all messages in a single dbx file into separate eml files which means that a dbx file with 100 mails will result in 100 eml files in the selected target directory. The homepage of the developer is in German, the program interface itself is in English.

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Outlook Express Settings and Outlook Express Dialogs are available as tabs in the main program window. The tweaks are simply checklists that display a short description of the tweak beneath the list. The settings tweaks provide access to features such as smooth scrolling, a custom attachment path, custom mail and news folders and hiding accounts from users.

The Outlook Express Dialogs tab makes it easier to disable certain dialogs and warning messages in Outlook Express. It’s possible to disable the warning when deleting messages, sending messages or that a message will be saved in the drafts folder.

I’m not a huge fan of Outlook Express and would recommend to change to a mail client like Thunderbird or Opera’s M2 mail client instead to increase security and comfort. If you have to use Outlook Express or like it that much you should give the Outlook Express Tweaker a go.

You have to scroll down on the huge downloads page until you find the download the for the application. It’s located almost at the end of the page.

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So i started by burning all relevant files to a DVD. The relevant files were all the Outlook .dbx files that I was able to find in Documents & Settings. To be precise the correct path is \Local Settings\Application Data\Identities… It’s a hidden folder so make sure that one is revealed to you. My thoughts were that it would surely be only a matter of seconds to import those dbx files into Windows Mail and be on my way home.

Unfortunately though Windows Mail behaves a little bit erratic when it comes to importing mails from Outlook Express. I suppose it behaves the same way when importing mails from Outlook. Whenever i tried to import the email by pointing Windows Mail to the folder the mail was saved in it automatically added a second Outlook Express folder in the path.

Selecting e:\outlook express as the path would lead to e:\outlook express\outlook express as the import path. Now I tried to select e:\ only in the hope that this would solve the problem but surprisingly though it did not add the folder outlook express whenever I tried that.

Here is the trick that worked. I created a new folder in outlook express, named it outlook express and did move all the dbx files into that folder. I then pointed the import folder to e:\outlook express, the second outlook express folder was added and the mails were imported just fine.

You start the import by clicking on File > Import > Messages by the way. This way I was able to import dbx files from Outlook Express into Windows Mail without difficulties. I’m not sure why a second folder is added in the path automatically but it surely has to have a reason.

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This makes it very problematic to import the mails from an Outlook Express account into another mail client. Some mail clients, for example Thunderbird, offers a direct import function that is able to detect Outlook Express mails and import them directly into Thunderbird.

Other mail clients do not offer this function though. DbxConv is a command line utility that is able to convert dbx files from Outlook Express into the widely known mbx mail format. The easiest way of using this tool is to copy the dbx mails from Outlook Express into the directory of DbxConv and use the command DbxConv *.dbx to convert all files with the .dbx extension to mbx.

I would suggest to search for all files with the .dbx extension on your hard drive and copy those into the DbxConv folder.

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Nevertheless I have to cope with certain situations and one is that Microsoft Outlook creates duplicate emails from time to time due to various “hick ups”. If you take a look at Microsoft’s knowledgebase you soon find out that it lists several situations where Outlook might download the same email message more than once. I listed some of them for your convenience in the next paragraph.

• You are prompted for your password, and you may receive duplicate e-mail messages if your profile has two POP3 accounts in Outlook (link)
• Duplicate e-mail messages are downloaded from a POP3 e-mail server account in Outlook 2003 (link)
• Duplicate junk e-mail messages appear in the Junk E-mail folder in Outlook 2003 (link)

This are just some of the knowledgebase articles that you can find searching for duplicate mails in Outlook 2003. The same applies to other versions of Microsoft Outlook including 2002 for instance. Now to clear the duplicate emails you can use the free software Microsoft Outlook Duplicate Items Remover which scans a selected folder for duplicate emails and moves them to a separate folder where you can delete them easily.

This is by far the easiest way to cope with this situation. The software does not only remove duplicate emails in Microsoft Outlook but also duplicate notes, contacts, calendar entries and tasks making it pretty universal.

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