|
Summary: Burning email folders to CD is a reasonable way to archive email and free up space - until you want to read it. Then additional steps are needed. I have many folders in Outlook Express that I would like to copy to CD to free up hard disk space. I would like to then access them directly from the CD in the future to read and print. I can't get it to work. Why not? Well, you certainly can put your email on CD. In fact, it's a popular way to back things up. But in what many consider to be a really perverse "feature" of both Outlook and Outlook Express, you can't read your email directly from CD. Here's what you need to do. • Copy the CD contents back to your hard disk, and make sure the file(s) are not marked read-only. Both Outlook and Outlook Express require that they be able to write to your mail folders. Even if these are your permanent archives on which you never plan to make any changes, they still insist that they be able to write to them. (Technically it would be to allow them to update things like the read/unread status of messages and the like.) The "solution", such as it is, is that you need to copy your mail folders back off of the CD's and place them on your hard disk so that the email programs can access them. As you can see, that puts "freeing up disk space" and "accessing your archived email" at odds with each other. You can free disk space as long as you don't need to read the mail. If you need to read the mail, you can't free up the disk space. "Both Outlook and Outlook Express require that they be
able to write to your mail folders."
There's also a catch that gets a lot of people: when you copy a file from a read-only media like a CD-ROM and place it on your hard disk, most frequently the files "Read Only" status will be set on the hard disk. That means - you guessed it - Outlook and Outlook Express still won't be able to open the file. The solution is to reset the "Read Only" flag for the file. Using an Outlook ".pst" file as an example, locate it in Windows Explorer, and right click on the file:
Click on Properties:
Note the Read-only checkbox. If you've just copied the file from CD, chances are this setting is checked. Uncheck it, click on OK, and you should now be able to open the file in Outlook. Related:
• Recent Comments
You can try DBXtract or DBXpress program to extract all messages (*.eml) from DBX files. Then burn EML files to CD for future access directly. Of course, you must have email client program running on your system to read them (Outlook or Outlook Express). For more info visit: www.oehelp.com Also, you can simply extract messages by dragging them from the message list and dropping them on your desktop or a folder if you don't want to pay for the 3rd party software. Posted by: James Le at December 22, 2006 04:40 PMThanks for your willingness to share what you've learned. Your attitude and patience are great, and your ability to simplify and illustrate is superb. Thanks again. I am subscribed now to your weekly updates. Please tell me how to copy cd contents (Outlook Express e-mails in multiple files already backed up ) to my hard drive. Thanks, Jon Posted by: Jon Hall at September 16, 2007 06:01 PMPost a comment on "Why can't I put my email on CD?":
|
Archives Advertisers |
