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Outlook Express malfunctions/wont delete

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by ctos 2 views

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A friend of mine has a puzzling problem with his Outlook Express. He uses highspeed through the telephone company for his ISP. He starts his business day by booting up his computer, starts up his OE, brings in the mail. All as should be, but if he doesnt delete his email immediately, he looses all ability to do it and cant even send his email out until he closes the program. He went through the "repair" steps with the technicians at his ISP twice, both times he was told it would not happen again, but it did the very next time it booted up. What can possibly be the issue with OE?

6 replies

by gary56789

From the Properties dialog box for the C drive (I assume this has the OS), run Disk Cleanup from the General tab, next under the Tools tab left-click the Check Now button for Error Checking (if the OS is XP, it wants to run at startup so reboot now).

When done, defrag the HD and try to delete the files in Outlook Express. By the way, if it hasn't been defraged for a while (as I suspect), defrag 3 times for better performance. The MS defrag program is a little weak.

by ctos

If the issues continue, then I will attempt the suggestions you made, thank you! He had the machine tuned up at a shop in the summer and they had removed programs that he did not use, etc. But it had not solved the issues. I am not sure if they did a Defrag or not, but will keep it in mind.

by cwunder3

It's possible that your deleted items dbx file is corrupt.
Make sure there is nothing important in your deleted items before trying this.
Open Outlook Express. Go to Tools, Options. Click on the maintenance TAB. Click on Store Folder. This is the location of your emails and deleted items. Copy the location into your clipboard. Close outlook express. Paste the location into Start, Run and click open. This will take you to the outlook express folder on your C: drive. Delete the deleted items.dbx file. Restart outlook express and see if it runs better. It will re-create the deleted items.dbx file.

by ctos

I will keep this item in mind if there are any more problems develope with the Delete process. So far what I did seems to have solved the issues. Thanks

by ctos

I went over today to work on the problem and first i checked all the settings and connection settings. They were basically okay. Second thing i noticed was the fact that he had 8 Accounts in the All tab, only one was necessary and removed extras. Next, I checked the properties of the Inbox and found that there were over 700 emails! But we could not telling it to delete or transfer manually to the Delete Folder. So I compacted the Inbox, which took about 15 minutes! I was using the basic principle of too much stuff slows the machine as my thought. Then we could delete items from the Inbox or otherwise. Also, we could now send and email directly from the program, instead of only when the program is closed out and it asks if we wish to send the waiting emails now. Then i showed my friend how to block senders, create Mail Rules for wanted and unwanted senders. After an hour and a half, the Outlook Express was now almost normal in speed. He still had to do more deletion and sorting before he was finished.
Outlook Express was bogged down and could not function anymore.

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