On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 13:49, Simon Mbuthia <simon.mbuthia@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi guys,

Someone has been using Outlook Express for their emails since 2007 and it has come to a point where the Inbox.dbx file is corrupted. I tried importing emails from Outlook Express into Office Outlook but all messages received between sometime in 2009 and the day before yesterday were missing from his inbox. So I have decided to try repairing his dbx and retrieve all messages as *.eml files. The trick now is importing the files into his Office Outlook. Dragging them into the inbox isn't working (they get attached to a blank message).

Any way out of this scenario? Google gives me links to trial software for converting dbx to pst and what-not, but I think this can be done without installing shareware.

Is a file of the type .eml a mail file? I mean, if you rename the extension from .eml to .txt, can you open it in notepad and read it?
Okay, I have done the homework by looking at http://www.coolutils.com/Formats/EML

"

What is EML?

EML, which stands for ‘E-mail’, is the file extension of the Outlook Express Saved Mail Messages files. It belongs to the Microsoft range of e-mail management programs and is used for saving e-mails for storage and forwarding purposes.

Since the object of an EML file is to store e-mail messages, it is a plain text file, and as a result, has a standard file structure. It consists of a short header and the main body. The header contains the e-mail addresses of the sender and the recipient, the subject, and the time and date of the message. The main message of the e-mail is in the body of the file. EML files can also contain hyperlinks and attachments.

Since EML files are created to comply with the industry RFC 822 standard, they can be used with most e-mail clients, servers and applications. Besides the Microsoft Outlook Express, EML files can be opened using most e-mail clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Entourage, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and IncrediMail. Since EML files are plaintext and formatted much like MHT (MIME HTML) files, they can also be opened directly in the Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, by first changing the file extension from ‘.eml’ to ‘.mht’. It is also possible to view EML files using notepad or any other text editor.

My next qeustion is: Are the filenames unique? If you have them all in one directory, then the names are definately unique.

If you have the time, and you have a Unix-based OS (or do I just tell you "Linux"?) running somewhere, you could install a POP3 server on it and move all these files (by,say, ftp) into your account in the Linux. You simply configure the POP3 server to serve files from ~/Maildir. Place all the files in ~/Maildir/new/ and configure Outlook to connect to the POP3 server, authenticating as yourself, and voila! You'll fetch all the mail files into Outlook's Inbox, then move them to wherever you want.