Save Emails to Disk?

[Jeremy]

Hello. I was wondering if it was possible to save Emails
from Outlook Express 6 to disk. I have a bunch from a
friend in the Army stationed somewhere in the Middle East
(he can't say where) that I really want to hold onto but
they're on my old computer. I want to be able to keep
them on disk. We used to have Prodigy on that computer
which ran MSIE 6 and Outlook 6 but later we replaced
Prodigy with AOL but dispite doing this my friend's
Emails remained on the computer so that even without a
connection to the internet (i.e. signed off from AOL) I
could still open Outlook and see the Emails there which
meant that the Emails had to be saved somewhere on my
hard drive. I looked through some folders and tried some
searches but got nothing. They have to be SOMEWHERE on my
hard drive if I can read them when I'm not even connected
to the internet. Any ideas? I looked through the Outlook
folder, the Internet Explorer folder and the Temporary
folders and found nothing. Any information would be
great. Even if the files for the Emails are unreadable
garbage that'd be ok because if I want to read them I can
just copy them from disk to the appropriate folder and
Outlook could turn them into readable Emails for me. I
suppose I could just copy all the Emails' text to MS Word
and save them as text documents... Thank you all very
much.

Jeremy

 

[Jeremy]

First of all, I'd like to apologize for even posting this
question without first checking the other posts to see if
someone else had asked the same question already (several
have). It's a bad habit of mine. I'm sorry about that
because it's like flaming, it bumps other questions off
of pages and annoys people because hey have to see and
answer the same questions again and again. I'll work on
that.

Though none of the answers to other peoples' questions
helped me DIRECTLY (e.g. there are no .pst files on my
computer that I could find dispite searching my whole
hard drive for "*.pst"; I'm running Win Me on the old
computer, Win XP Pro on my new one and Outlook Express 6
on both) I was able to use bits and pieces of several
different answers to solve my problem. Here's what I did.
Hopefully this will help other people:

THIS WORKED ON MY WIN Me AND WIN XP COMPUTERS WHICH BOTH
RUN OUTLOOK EXPRESS 6...

TO FIND THE EMAIL FILES:

1. On the computer you want to copy the Emails from go to
Outlook, select the folder whose Emails you want to copy,
right click it and go to Properties (this was the key to
finding out how to do it. Thank you, neo [mvp outlook]!)

2. Highlight the pathname under "This folder is stored in
the following file" EXCEPT FOR THE LAST PART OF IT THAT
SAYS THE NAME OF THE FILE YOU'RE TRYING TO COPY (e.g. on
my Win XP I get " C:\Documents and Settings\Jeremy\Local
Settings\Application Data\Identities\{4AFD1CEE-3241-4ACD-
8606-B438F26D1F17}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\Inbox.dbx."

LEAVE OUT the "Inbox.dbx" so that all you have
highlighted is "C:\Documents and Settings\Jeremy\Local
Settings\Application Data\Identities\{4AFD1CEE-3241-4ACD-
8606-B438F26D1F17}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\" and press
CTRL + C (i.e. Copy).

3. Go to My Computer and on the Address bar click where
it says "My Computer." "My Computer" will become
highlighted. Press CTRL + V (i.e. Paste") and press
Enter. NOTE: This takes you to a hidden folder on your
computer. If for some reason your computer won't let you
see them go to Tools > Folder Options... > View Tab >
Select "Show hidden files and folders." Press Apply then
OK.

4. There before you are the files of all the folders on
Outlook. Copy the folders you want to keep to disk.

TO VIEW SAVED FILES ON ANOTHER COMPUTER:

1. On the new computer, Open Outlook, go to File > New >
Folder... or select one of the mail folders (e.g. Inbox),
right click and select "New Folder..."

2. Create a new folder. As an example, I'll make one
called, "OLD Inbox."

3. Repeat steps 1 through 4 from above to get to the
folder that contains the Outlook mailbox files. You'll
notice a new file called, "OLD Inbox.dbx."

4. Delete "OLD Inbox.dbx" and replace it with the file
you copied from the old computer, making sure to rename
that file to "OLD Inbox.dbx" without ANY differences in
spelling, spaces, etc. NOTE: If you have Outlook open
while doing this, make sure to have a different folder
besides "OLD Inbox" (e.g. Outbox, Drafts) active or else
you'll get the "cannot delete/rename file because it's in
use by another program" message.

5. Go back to Outlook, open OLD Inbox and your old Emails
should be there. This is because you fooled Outlook into
thinking that the file from you old computer is the one
it just created and it opens the files as if it is. How
gullible (it worked for me).

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KEEP ALL THE EMAILS IN THE FOLDER:

1. Copy the Outlook file that contains the Emails you
want.

2. Repeat steps 1 through 5 from above.

3. Open Outlook and after selecting the "old mailbox"
that contains the Emails you want and the ones you don't
(step 5 from above) use Outlook like normal and simply
delete the ones you don't want.

4. Close Outlook, move the "old mailbox's" file to disk,
and you'll have a permanent record of ONLY the Emails you
want. Delete an Email by mistake? Don't worry, it goes to
the Deleted Items folder just like any other Email. NOTE:
I haven't tried all this, myself but I don't see why it
shouldn't work.

The problem with this is that any time you want to read
the Emails you'll have to put them in that Outlook folder
and have Outlook open it for you since only it can
understand ".dbx" files (as far as I know). Of course,
you can always copy the text of the Emails piece by piece
to a word processor and save it as a text document.

I hope this helps people out there. Good luck!

Jeremy