Personal Computers Questions

How come I am unable to delete email in Outlook Express?

by on June 9, 2011

Q: Why won’t Outlook Express delete emails anymore?

It all started yesterday: I have been trying to delete some items but it won’t work, no matter what I try: click on the red cross, right click and select “Delete”, select mail and press “Delete”, even move the item to another folder.

I can still send and receive emails though, so I guess it’s not about available space storage.

I can’t go on my C:\\ drive and delete all the .dbx folders, since I wish to keep some of the items.

Help!

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4 Responses to “How come I am unable to delete email in Outlook Express?”
  1.  

    From outlook express click
    File> Folder> Compact All Folders

    Then try deleting your e-mails again.

     

    Mark (Uber Geek) says: on June 9, 2011 at 8:23 am

  2.  

    Is there anything else I could do? I’d like to avoid compacting my folders, as it would make recovering data much more difficult in case of system failure.

     

    Rednalas (Newbie) says: on June 10, 2011 at 2:49 am

  3.  

    Probably not, if you’ve been using express for a while, and actively avoiding compacting your folders, that is probably your problem. Express has a really hard time dealing with very large uncompacted folders. After a while, if you don’t compact them then deletes will simply stop working. If anything no compacting them likely increases your risk for the data files becoming corrupted.

    Your suggested method of data recovery is risky at best. If your harddrive fails you’re going to lose everything no matter what you did with your folders. Backup your e-mails using an external drive, or better yet completely off site with something like a dropbox.com account or crashplan.com

    Also consider moving to a web based e-mail service like gmail so all your e-mails are extra safe.

     

    Mark (Uber Geek) says: on June 10, 2011 at 9:14 am

  4.  

    Thank you, I’ll save my items on an external hard drive before trying to fix anything, and I will let you know how it goes…

     

    Rednalas (Newbie) says: on June 14, 2011 at 8:49 am