How do I remove a pesky message in Windows Mail?

One of the problems I see happening repeatedly with Outlook Express relates to it's "data store", the files and folders that make up the database in which it keeps your email. It's apparently fragile, and proprietary.

Windows Mail, while clearly a successor to Outlook Express in almost every other way, uses a slightly different storage mechanism. Rather than single files containing all messages in a folder, each folder is ... well, a folder on disk. And each message is a single file.

Seems simple, right? Well, it's not really, since Windows Mail still keeps a separate index of your messages in a separate, proprietary file. But, if the problem is with the message body, and not Window's Mail's index, we may be able to help with the problem you're facing. This may not work, but it's something to try.

In Windows Mail, we'll locate the store folder this way:

• Click on the Tools menu

• Click on the Options... menu item

• Click on the Advanced tab

• Click on the Maintenance... button

• Click on the Store Folder... button

After all that clicking, you should see a dialog box much like this one:

Close Windows Mail, and open Windows Explorer and navigate to that folder. You should see something similar to this:

If you double click on Local Folders, you should now see folders for each of your top level mail folders like Inbox, Outbox and the like.

If you double click on Outbox, you'll likely see at least one, perhaps more, ".eml" files. These are messages waiting to be sent. If you don't mind losing them all, then just delete them.

If you need to actually save them or at least make an intelligent decision about which to delete, you can open them in Notepad to examine the message that each contains. Based on what you find, you can decide what to delete.

Now, unfortunately, we're not done. If you now open Windows Mail again, you might see that the messages still appear in the folder from which you think you deleted them. That's because of the separate index of all the messages that I mentioned earlier. However, if the problem is with the message body itself, you may now be able to delete the message in Windows Mail, whereas before you might not have been able to.

And if you can, that may clear up the other problem(s) you may be having. Perhaps you'll be able to send again.

Now, if the problem is with Windows Mail's index, things get dicier.

I'm not aware of a do-it-yourself solution, like we attempted above. There are recovery tools out there, most of which claim to work with Outlook Express, but some may now also work with Windows Mail. I can't recommend, or even suggest one, since I've never used one. I'm very skeptical of most, since each time I post an article on the topic, the companies feel the need to spam the comments with obvious advertisements for their products. However, if readers have honest recommendations for tools that are worth investigating, particularly tools that work well with Vista's Windows Mail, I'd love to see those.

My solution? As I've mentioned before: Thunderbird. It doesn't actually solve your current problem, but it avoids its recurrence. Thunderbird data stores are plain text files ("mbox" format, for those who care), and the indexes Thunderbird keeps can be rebuilt on demand by simply compacting, or by deleting the existing ones (".msf" files).