Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair 1.2 - Outlook Express Mail Recovery Tool

Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair can open mailboxes that Outlook Express refuses to touch, handily recovering mail from damaged .dbx files. If Outlook Express Repair could look for other problems with Outlook Express installations in addition, that would be fabulous.

The better and more reliably Outlook Express has worked in the past the more distressing it is when, suddenly, it refuses to open mail in a folder — or open any mail at all. Do you have a backup? Never mind, as long as you have another tool up your sleeve your messages can probably be recovered. And with Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair you have such a tool.

Using a simple wizard, you tell it where the broken .dbx files (the mysterious format used by Outlook Express to store mail) are — your default files are even found automatically. Outlook Express Repair scans the file for remnants of emails and returns them to, usually, legible state.

You can even preview the messages right inside Outlook Express Repair and decide which are worthy of rescue. I wrote legible form is restored "usually" because, though it could find the beginnings and ends of messages reliably in my tests, Outlook Express Repair sometimes was not able to restore the different parts of a message to their proper order. Plain text may mix with HTML code and attachments. At least the data is there, and Outlook Express repair saves it to either a .dbx file or separate .eml files, which can be easily imported back into Outlook Express.

Still, more format flexibility would be nice, and if Outlook Express Repair could repair more than "just" .dbx files — broken settings and registry entries, namely —, that would make it an even better tool up any Outlook Express user's sleeve.