The Bottom Line
Pros
- Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair opens damaged Outlook Express .dbx files and recovers mail
- Mail can be previewed right in Outlook Express Repair and exported to .dbx or .eml files
- Outlook Express files are detected automatically, but you can open any .dbx file easily
Cons
- Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair could export recovered mail to more file formats
- Configuration, registry or DLL problems are not detected or corrected by Outlook Express Repair
- Not unexpectedly, recovery from heavily damaged files is not always perfect
Description
- Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair recovers mail from .dbx files.
- Files belonging to your Outlook Express installation are automatically identified.
- You can import from any .dbx file or folder containing .dbx files, though.
- Outlook Express Repair shows displays recovered messages for preview.
- You can save individual messages or groups to either a .dbx file or individual .eml files.
- Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP and Outlook Express 5/6.
Guide Review - Diskinternals Outlook Express Repair 1.2 - Outlook Express Mail Recovery 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.
