Outlook Express Email Folder Recovery without Losing Existing Hierarchy
It happened to me a few days ago that Outlook Express suddenly did not show a bunch of email folders anymore. I freaked out at first, because I thought that the emails were lost, but I found out that this was not the case. The emails were still there, but the folder file, which is created for each and every email folder in Outlook Express was simply missing in the OE folder hierarchy. Phew! I thought, that should be fixed in no-time at all. Well, I learned that I was mistaken, because there is no way to tell Outlook Express, that it has a file for an email folder sitting in its directory together with the other email folder files and that it would be great to simply add that to its folder index. I thought that this cannot be. And found something promising after a few searches at Google. This Microsoft Knowledge Base article describes the scenario for how to recover email folders in Outlook Express, if there are any missing in the OE folder index. Great! But wait, there is a catch. If you follow the (incomplete by the way) instructions, you end up with all folders back in Outlook Express, alright, but without the existing folder hierarchy. Every email folder is now in the root, no sub-folders anymore. Well, I have over 1,000 folders that are organized in a complex hierarchy that can go 4-5 levels deep. I only miss a few folders. Why should I screw[…]