OT: Outlook Express problem

[BogMonster]

Posted this yesterday afternoon but it seemed to disappear too....

I am using Outlook Express 6 for mail at work and I keep all my old emails, now about 10,000 or so I suppose, for future reference - however I archive them off into other folders to keep the Inbox relatively fast loading (usually keep the current year's messages in the Inbox and have a folder for 2003, folder for 2004, etc etc)

The reason I do this is so I can go up to the Local Folders (top of the folder tree) and search by senders email address and it turns up everything from them which makes things easy to find. However, in the last few months the computer will turn up a list of messages in the "Find" window but when you try and open the message it says

"Message could not be displayed

Outlook Express encountered an unexpected problem while displaying this message. Check your computer for low memory or low disk space and try again."

This is rubbish as there is plenty of disk space and the computer was only recently upgraded from 128mb RAM to 384mb, and it used to work perfectly well with 128mb (the problem didn't start at the time of the memory upgrade AFAIK)

If I note the folder that the message is stored in, and the date, I can navigate to the location of the message and open it with no problem, just can't open it from the "find" window - which is a PITA because it makes it very hard to check through a heap of messages when you are looking for something

any thoughts please? I can't find anything on the Microsoft knowledge base nor Google

is there a practical limit on how many emails Outlook Express can cope with and am I about to hit it? I can't find anything published on this and I can't believe I have anywhere near as many emails as some people must have!

Thanks

Stephen

[Divster]

I had a similar problem with my laptop at work (running 2002 Outlock on windows XP). It turned out that despite me telling the machine not to auto-archive, it did it anyway. Because I didn't have the archives pointed to any readable file I couldn't get back to them. Unfortunately I lost quite alot of work related stuff.

The problem has now been resolved, but i had to get the techies to do it. It was way above my head

[simonr]

Steve,

I found a similar limit as the archive got bigger - I can only assume it's a built-in limit on the number of archived blocks of data it can maintain a pointer to. I kept getting bits of messages returned and sometimes not at all.

My solution was to change to Eudora which seems not to suffer from the same problems and IMO is better anyway.

Another option would be to move your archive to Eudora or similar and delete it from OE.

Si