Lately my computer has been taking ages to get up to speed when I log in. Some of this is the natural accumulation of Cruft that you get with Windows. (I think I’m currently running somewhere between Cruft Force 4 and 5) But some of it is down to my huge and ever-growing Windows Profile.
I’ve never seen an adequate explanation of what exactly is in one’s profile, but I’m sure that my Outlook Express message store is part of it. I don’t clean out my Inbox very regularly (there were 357 messages in my home inbox at the start of this evening, and my inbox at work is well over 1500), which means that old messages tend to linger, and take up space. Because I had it set to go straight to my inbox when I launch it, OE was taking about 30 seconds to get up and running. This was getting tiresome.
So this evening I thought I’d tidy up. I do actually have a filing structure in my message store–I just don’t use it very much. But at least I didn’t have to create a bunch of folders from scratch for sorting the messages in my inbox. I just started throwing them into neat little piles.
Started being the operative term there, because after moving two messages, Outlook Express decided that the whole operation was clearly futile, and froze up.
It didn’t crash, it just decided it wasn’t going to show me my inbox any more. Or anything else, once I’d tried to look in my inbox.
This was a problem, because I had Outlook Express set to automatically go to that very same inbox whenever it starts. (Tools -> Options -> General -> When starting, go directly to my ‘Inbox’ folder. Check!) And of course, one can’t get to these settings unless one has Outlook Express open. But as soon as Outlook Express opens, it goes to my Inbox, and…freezes.
There was a solution, though. A couple of different solutions, really.
Option 1 was to fire up Mozilla‘s mail and news program. It’s a fine, fully featured mail program, with all the same bells and whistles of Outlook Express, and more besides. It also has a handy “Import” feature, which grabbed all of the messages from my Outlook Express mail store without a single problem.
(I’m inching my way closer to the Microsoft breaking point at the moment. Sooner or later, as I do about once a year, I will snap and install Linux on my computer. I always go back to Windows after a while, but there are a number of new developments that make me wonder if I can really make a full switch now: Mozilla, OpenOffice, and VMWare. Mozilla has leapfrogged Opera on Linux now, and is the better product. OpenOffice is now sufficiently mature to be a reasonable Office replacement. And VMWare version 3 supports USB connections on its virtual machines. I’d still have to run Windows in a VM for some apps, but 95% of my computer time is spent on the web, or writing. It could happen….)
Option 2 was to do a similar process, only with Outlook Express. I navigated to my message store (C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Application Data\Identities\BLAHBLAHGUIDBLAHGUIDGUIDBLAH\), copied all of the files there to a backup directory, then deleted all of the files from the original message store.
When I fired up OE again, it recreated a blank Inbox for me, which was free of any corruption that had crept into the old one. I then used OE’s import feature to re-import all of the old messages and folders from the backup directory I’d created. I hadn’t expected this to work. I’d thought that my old inbox file had been corrupted somehow, and that the import would fail when it tried to scan it. But it all came back perfectly, and the new inbox displayed all of my old messages perfectly (albeit slowly again).
(Oh–before I did that, I had managed to find a way of changing the Outlook Express startup setting so that it didn’t launch straight into my inbox. It’s all in the registry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Identities\ BLAHBLAHGUIDBLAHGUIDGUIDBLAH\ Software\Microsoft\ Outlook Express\5.0 Look for the key called “Launch Inbox”, and change it from 1 to 0. Simple…if you know what you’re looking for.)
Once everything was back, I did get to spend the time sorting out my inbox. It is now lovely and clean, with only three messages in it I need to reply to. And Outlook Express starts up within seconds now. Cool! The last question I have, though, is why I now have a 15Mb file called “Deleted Items.dbx” in my message store, when Oulook tells me that my Deleted Items folder is empty?
Whooooooo…. Message Store of Mystery!