I have been suprised at the number of people that have gone to the trouble of finding an email address for me to provide comments and compliments about various entries. So I suppose I should provide an easily accessible address.
So consider this an invitation to email me with comments, criticisms, and what not about this blog. The email address is sysadmin followed by the @ sign, with the domain "fief.org" after it.
I apologize for the annoyance of presenting my email address this way, but spammers are doing their best to make email useless, and I must fight back to keep my email a useful communication tool.
A user came into my office this morning saying that he was having
troubles with Outlook Express. A few questions later, and I learn that
the program crashed whenever he tried to open his inbox. I had seen the
problem before, it was undoubtebly because of a corrupt dbx file
(the format used by Outlook Express to save folders full of
messages).
After making a copy of the Outlook Express folder from his
Application Data directory, we tried compacting the folder followed by
compacting all folders. Outlook Express would still crash upon opening
his inbox. We deleted the folders.dbx file hoping that the central
index was the problem. That didn't solve the problem either. Searching
for assistance from Microsoft, I come across the page:
The Other E-Mail Threat: File Corruption in Outlook Express
Tangent: I find databases and other binary structures for storing
mail to be overkill and a bad idea. The primary argument used for why it
is a good idea is to make searching and manipulating large mailboxes
faster. Sure, it can be faster, but plenty of email clients do a fine
job without storing your mail away in a binary blob. Mail should be
stored in a nice simple mbox related format. While
mbox certainly has it's own
problems, at least I have never seen a mail client crash from a
corrupt mail file, and when I did see an instance of a client breaking
the file, I was able to recover nearly all of the messages by hand with
a simple text editor. Plus, text files make it much easier to migrate
your mail to another client should that become necessary.
I was horrified by the article. They were advocating purchasing
software to solve what is apparently a common fault with Outlook
Express. Besides DBXtract (the
product recommend in the article above), there are
many,
othertools to
recovercorruptdbxfiles.
There is simply no excuse for this. If this problem is common enough to
have spawned that many products to fix it, Microsoft needs to get it's
act together, fix Outlook Express and/or ship as part of the program a
method to repair corrupt db files.
With no intention to purchase software to support software that isn't
on our supported software list, I provided him with the most recent
backup of the files and he was able to get back up and running.
