How do I move my Outlook Express folders to my new machine?

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Hi Ray,
don't import your old address book. EXCHANGE it! First: The folder information of your address book is not in the ????.wab file, but rather in the corresponding ????.wa~ file. -- Go to the place where the actual ???.wab and ???.wa~ files are on the target computer. Write down their names, could be different from your old address book name. Then delete them. Copy you "old" ????.wab and ????.wa~ files at that place. Rename them to the names which you have written down. That's it. Upon next opening, Outlook Express finds your well-organized "old" address book with all the foulders.

Hi Leo,

although I find your advice very useful I sometimes find that has "holes"..now though I understand that you cannot provide details on every little thing...i am finding that this question is a regular question asked on many advice forums and is always left un-answered... so i leave it to you Leo (my Saviour) to answer it, so here it comes:

Now... The situation is thus; My old PC gave up the 'stink' and therfore I had to invest in another one, now although the rest of the PC has been upgraded, I have brought the old hard drive across and introduced it to the system as a secondary hard drive (refered to as E:)... I copied the dbx files across from the old hard drive to a New folder on to the desktop on the Primary hard drive; however when I imported these DBX files into outlook express all went well apart from the folder structure was not imported and therefore the emails contained within seperate folders are not there... the DBX files i have copied all have the names of my old folders i.e. {folder name}.dbx and i also have located the folders.dbx file and placed this in the 'new folder' but still outlook express is refusing to import the folder structure and also the emails contained....

What do you suggest?

Thanks in advance and kind

Alex Scotton

Alex, about the structure import and dbx-importation, I found a trick in http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/faqs/how.htm#importdbx

You can periodically save a copy of the dbx file on a CDROM and clean the dbx. If you need to read a message stored on the CD, you can find it and read using a tool as "ArchiVista".
Bye.
Guido

I hate to be a stick-in-the-mud here, but I too was relieved when I read that all I needed to do was turn off the "read-only" feature of the folder, but I'm finding that every folder on my C drive - even ones i create new with nothing in them - has at least a shaded checkmark next to "read-only," and no matter how often I uncheck it and hit "apply" and "OK," it is there again when i check that folder's properties. So no matter what I do to try to "share" the folder with the .dbx files in it (even moving it to the All Users Shared Folder), I still get the "Import error: The mail folder could not be opened. If another application is using this file, please close it and try again." Just thought I'd mention that here to see if there's anything else we can try before I give up entirely and start bringing in tens of thousands of emails one at a time as .eml files. Thank you!

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What you're describing sounds like the file sharing setting, which is
NOT what we're talking about here.

This article includes screen shots of the setting to be changed:
http://ask-leo.com/why_cant_i_open_this_file.html

Leo
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I wanted to move my email messages from Outlook Express on an old Win 98SE machine to Outlook on a new XP machine. There are 2 major confusing things to note that hardly any advice posts tell you.
1. The export on OE gives you an error message something like cannot initialise MAPI. BUT this is for exporting to Outlook on the same computer, why o why can it not just tell you this! Instead you shift / copy the .dbx files to a CD or whatever as many posts do tell you.
2. On the new computer you have to import to Outlook Express first. Then and only then can you import to Outlook!!

My problem is similar to one of the others posted but I took a different approach.

My wifes computer, an emachine (and yes I do love her inspite of my poor choice of computers for her) abruptly died. All advice I found pointed to beating it with a large mallet and moving on. I took the hard drive and installed it a slave drive on then new machine I purchase for her (NOT AN EMACHINE..she is forgiving but don't want to push it). I now need to locate the folder without the benefit on the old (no slave) hardrive on the new system.

I tried searching for all .dbx files knowing that OE stores them as such and thinking that would lead me to the correct path but that yielded nothing except for some old .dbx files from a previous attempt to restore her emails.

I noted that the system folder on the slave drive appears to have nothing in it. I have no experience with secondary drives so I was thinking that perhaps I have no way to access the information store if it start of the system folder on the slave drive even though data must exist there.

Perhaps someone has experience working with slave drives and could help somehow. I know only enough to install it without electricuting myself and little else on access characteristic or how to get the old OE database of the slave and onto the new system.

Thank you for the effortless transition information. My "Local Settings" folder was hidden. I just unhid and everything went smooth.

Great instructions! I could never work out how to do this in the past.

Only thing I would add is for email address transers, if the directory that Outlook Express says it's stored email addresses in is within "Local Settings", and you can't find this directory, you need to un-hide it. Open up Windows Explorer or the "My Documents" folder. From the menu at the top, choose "Tools", then "Folder Options", then select the "View" tab. Within the list of options that appear, under "Hidden files and folders" check/select "Show hidden files and folders" and press "OK". Now you should see the "Local Settings" folder when you look for it.

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