I am planning to format my PC. My question is this: how do I save all my emails in Outlook express? They have no location, Ive looked. Plus there is no option to save them.

Please help!

The data appears to be stored in the following location:

"Document and Settings\Your Windows XP login name\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\Long line of letters and numbers\Outlook Express"

Substitute your information for the ""Your Windows XP" portion. On your system the "Long line of letters and numbers" might be different.

There should be SEPARATE folders for EACH Windows XP OS login account.

They are there and it isn't hard to find them, if we are running similar systems. To find the files, type .dbx in a search of all folders of your hard drive. That should locate all of them. Don't forget the dot (.) before dbx. I am running Windows XP and just did the search and found all of mine.

If you do the search this way and find all of them, you could highlight them and copy and paste them into a new folder that you can create on the desktop and then burn that folder and it's contents to a CD. Your email would thus be saved. However, in order to open the individual email files, you would need a dbx file converter. There are some available for free on the Internet. I have used them. But it is a pain. After you convert the files, you have to drag them into the folders in whatever email software you are using, like Outlook Express.

Another way to save the files without having to use a dbx file converter, would be to create a new folder on your desktop and drag each individual email directly to the folder. You could create individual folders within the new folder and label them correspondingly to the folders in Outlook Express, Inbox, Sent, etc. They would be saved without having to convert them then. Then burn the folders to a CD. Then put them back into their individual folders in your Outlook Express after you have formatted your hard drive. This way works well if you don't have many emails to transfer individually.

Yet another way to save the files would be to have either the whole contents of your hard drive or just the email section transferred over to another hard drive and then transfer them back to your hard drive after it is formatted. I have not done it this way, and so don't know the intricacies of it. But, I know that it can be done with things being relocated where they should, because a friend of mine is a computer tech who makes my computers for me when I need a new one and he ends up transferring the contents of my hard drive onto his and then transferring everything back into my new machine.

I know that there are probably other ways to do these things, but I am not well-versed in them.

Hi Brad,

In Outlook Express go to Tools -> options -> maintenance tab -> store folder button.

This will open a window showing you the location of your messages. Select all of this text by dragging the mouse from the beginning right to the end and then press Ctrl+C.

Next paste the location into the run window by pressing start -> run -> delete all the text in the run box & press ctrl+V. then click OK and your message store folder contents will be displayed.

Backup the contents of this folder to save your messages. When you want to restore them after your re-formatting, simply do the same on the new computer to find the new message store and copy your backups over the top of the new files!

Good luck. And don't forget your address book - this is stored separately