OE Address Book Recovery program?

L

Larry Sabo

A neighbour has a corrupted Address Book and I found a shareware
program that can recover the entries, but have been unable to find a
freeware program to do so. Any suggestions?

Larry

PS - The problem is manifest as an error when he tries to open the
Adrress Book: "The Address Book failed to load. Outlook Express is
incorrectly configured, please re-install." I saved a copy of the
Address Book elsewhere then deleted the original, which caused OE to
build a new, empty one, which opens fine. I'd like to recover what I
can from the corrupted Address Book.
 
T

The Six Million Dollar Man

* Larry Sabo:
A neighbour has a corrupted Address Book and I found a shareware
program that can recover the entries, but have been unable to find a
freeware program to do so. Any suggestions?

Larry

PS - The problem is manifest as an error when he tries to open the
Adrress Book: "The Address Book failed to load. Outlook Express is
incorrectly configured, please re-install." I saved a copy of the
Address Book elsewhere then deleted the original, which caused OE to
build a new, empty one, which opens fine. I'd like to recover what I
can from the corrupted Address Book.
Click to expand...

Is this Microsoft Knowledge Base article of any help?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917288
 
J

jmatt

Larry said:
A neighbour has a corrupted Address Book and I found a shareware
program that can recover the entries, but have been unable to find a
freeware program to do so. Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

See if this helps, if not an operating system & version of OE will
help.

Stephen Cochran's free program, DBXtract, from >
Rareware section > http://www.themolezone.cjb.net/
http://digilander.libero.it/molearchive3/dbxtract.zip
http://www.reliquary.co.uk/tech/downloads/DBXtract.zip
http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx

This will extract all the mail from any dbx file and save each message
as a separate plain text
file. These files are named from the Subject line and have an eml
extension, so, again, you can
put them back in your mailbox by dragging them from Windows Explorer
and dropping them in
Outlook Express. An even better solution would be to import them into a
proper database.
This does that.
StoMail from > http://home.sprintmail.com/~1854316/
 
L

Larry Sabo

The Six Million Dollar Man said:
A neighbour has a corrupted Address Book and I found a shareware
program that can recover the entries, but have been unable to find a
freeware program to do so. Any suggestions?
Click to expand...
[snip]

Is this Microsoft Knowledge Base article of any help?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917288
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried several MS KB suggestions involving
registry changes but nothing worked. I saw this and forgot to pursue
it. :/ I'll take note of it and try it next time I run into this
problem. Thanks.

In the meantime, I'm still lookig for a freeware program that can
recover addresses from a corrupted Address Book. I believe it is
indeed corrupted, as I tried to import it into Thunderbird, but TB
says it is corrupted (or words to that effect). OS is XP, BTW.

Larry
 
L

Larry Sabo

See if this helps, if not an operating system & version of OE will
help.
Click to expand...
[snip]

Thanks for the suggestions. The e-mail is all accessible, it's just
the Address Book that fails to open. OS is XP and OE is 6.0 SP1(IIRC).

Larry
 
J

jmatt

L

Larry Sabo

Maybe a repair will fix.

How to reinstall or repair Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in
Windows XP
http://is-it-true.org/nt/xp/utips/utips13.shtml
http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/howto-03.html
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=318378
http://www.theeldergeek.com/repair_reinstall_ie_and_oe_6.htm
Click to expand...

Thank you for that suggestion, too. I tried to repair OE but was
unable to do so using methods described in MS KB articles and
elsewhere. (I do home PC repairs as a small business, so you would
think I could manage such a simple task.) I won't consume even more
bandwidth describing my ineffective efforts, as we're way off topic
already.

My search for a freeware program to recover addresses from a corrupted
address book are more to prepare for the next time it happens. As I
mentioned earlier, my client's problem was solved by deleting the old
address book and re-generating addresses from e-mails in various
folders. My next client may not have a many e-mails to use.

Thanks again for your helpfulness, and that of the others who replied.
This is truly an excellent group and I browse it every day.

Cheers,
Larry
 
L

Larry Sabo

A

Anne Carle

Thanks for that, too. I'm going to get a copy of the corrupted address
book file and try some of the suggestions with it and OE on my system,
with the filename changed appropriately, of course. I'll report back
what worked, in due course.

Cheers, Larry
Click to expand...
Have you tried "compact all folders" yet within OE? That action
remedied some strange behaviours for me.

Anne/OH/USA
 
L

Larry Sabo

[snip]
Have you tried "compact all folders" yet within OE? That action
remedied some strange behaviours for me.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion Anne, but the problem lies within the
Address Book, not the dbx file containing e-mails. I know "Compact all
folders" recovers space occupied by "deleted" e-mails but I wasn't
aware that it touched the Address Book. My client could read and send
e-mails without problem but as soon as he clicked the Address Book
button, he got an error message saying the Address Book cannot be
loaded, etc. I'll get the corrupted Address Book (if I can undelete
it) and experiment.

I found a shareware program called Address Book Recovery that seemed
to do the trick, and wondered if there was a freeware equivalent.

Cheers,
Larry
 
L

Larry Sabo

socrtwo said:
Try http://i.domaindlx.com/bmproductions/moreprogs/index.htm (which
resolves into
http://i.domaindlx.com/bmproduction...maindlx.com/bmproductions/moreprogs/index.htm)
for the free WabMail address book address extractor. Maybe it will
work with corrupt WAB files.

I know yoiu fixed the problem, I'm posting because of the discussion is
interesting.

www.s2services.com - a freeware data recovery list
Click to expand...


Thanks for that. I'll try out the tool and report back.

Cheers, Larry
 
L

Larry Sabo

socrtwo said:
Try http://i.domaindlx.com/bmproductions/moreprogs/index.htm (which
resolves into
http://i.domaindlx.com/bmproduction...maindlx.com/bmproductions/moreprogs/index.htm)
for the free WabMail address book address extractor. Maybe it will
work with corrupt WAB files.

I know yoiu fixed the problem, I'm posting because of the discussion is
interesting.

www.s2services.com - a freeware data recovery list
Click to expand...


Ok, I've recovered the file using Brian Kato's Restoration Undelete
program and verified that it generates the exact same original error
when put back where it was.

Copied the corrupted file to my system, renamed it to <myusername>.wab
and tried to open the address book in OE -- generates the same error
message. Ran WabMail.

WabMail gives...
=====================================================================
"Error while opening the Address Book file. Check if the selected file
has a valid WAB-format.

Error code: -2147467259
Error message: Unspecified error"
=====================================================================

Under Tools, "Run Address Book Export Tool" is greyed out [probably
because WabMail can't open the corrupted address book.]

I'll try some of the other suggestions and report which work(s).

Cheers,
Larry
 
L

Larry Sabo

Anne Carle said:
Have you tried "compact all folders" yet within OE? That action
remedied some strange behaviours for me.

Anne/OH/USA
Click to expand...

Hi Anne, just tried compact all foders (offline) and made no
difference.

Cheers, Larry
 

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