Mentat’s Corrupt Mail File
[Mentat] and I finished the evening trying to import some mail files he had saved from an older computer running Outlook Express 6, into Windows Mail on his new Dell, which he brought here with him. Once we got past the missing folders.dbx file issue, we were able to see approximately 50 of the 500 messages that were in the file originally. Unfortunately however, we weren’t able to retrieve the others because the file appeared to be corrupt. I pulled it into UltraEdit and found that all but the top tenth of the file contained nothing but zeros. He did say that the hard drive on the original computer was going bad when he made copies of these files. So it’s possible that the copy he got was a bad one also. He was sad and so was I. I really wanted to help him more. But with so much of the file blanked out, I couldn’t do anymore than I did. Too bad. We couldn’t get the messages from the mail server either because most of them came in on a now-cancelled account. So we no longer have access to that mail server. Well, I guess he’ll have to make more frequent backups in the future and check them often for integrity.