• Backup Practices
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Software
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • External Drives
  • Online Backup
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • Website Backups

FileSlinger Backup Blog

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • E-zine
  • Questions?
  • Review Policy
  • Comment Policy
  • Disclosures

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-1-04: Backing Up Outlook Express

October 1, 2004 by Sallie Goetsch Leave a Comment

After last week’s piece on the Personal Folders Backup tool for Outlook, someone asked me about backing up Outlook Express.

If you use Outlook Express for your e-mail, my advice is—DON’T. Like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Outlook Express is the mail program most targeted by (and vulnerable to) the makers of viruses, worms, and other forms of malicious code.

However, if OE is what you use and what you’ve been using, you do still need to know how to back up your mail.

This, it turns out, is not as straightforward as with Outlook. Instead of keeping its mail and contact information all in one place, Outlook Express divides it across several different files. Microsoft provides detailed instructions for backing up and restoring Outlook Express data.

Here is the short form of the article.

To backup Outlook Express data:

  • Copy mail files to a backup folder
  • Export the Address Book to a file
  • Export the mail account to a file
  • Export the news account to a file

To restore or import Outlook Express data:

  • Import messages from the backup folder
  • Import the Address Book file
  • Import the mail account file
  • Import the news account file

There’s also an article about backing up and restoring the Outlook Express Blocked Sender List (which serves in place of the highly effective Outlook 2003 spam filtering system) and Mail Rules. Doing this involves exporting/importing part of the Registry—something that is best left to your tech support person, so that at least you can blame them if it results in a disaster.

In summary, backing up Outlook Express is a lot of work. Recognizing this, several companies have produced third-party Outlook Express backup products. If you do a Google search on “backup outlook express”, you’ll find several, some with free trials. They cost less than buying the full version of Outlook, but then again, all they provide is the ability to back up OE—they don’t include the integrated calendar, tasks, contacts, spam filters, mailmerge capabilities, etc of the full version of Outlook.

If all you want to back up are the actual messages, you can drag and drop them into a folder on your external hard drive, or put them onto a CD. I’ve done this before when transferring data from one computer to another. It’s not very sophisticated, but it works.

If you prefer your mail client just to do e-mail, but want an alternative to Outlook Express for purposes of internet security, try Eudora, PocoMail, or Mozilla Thunderbird. All have free or ad-supported versions. They are not necessarily easy to back up, however.

For those who use Netscape mail, Harvard University has provided handy backup guides:

  • PC Users
  • Mac Users

You can find a list of Windows e-mail backup utilities here.

Now that I’ve overwhelmed you with tasks and links, I’ll leave you to your backups.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: E-mail Backups

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search

Google Ads

Categories

  • Announcements
  • Archiving
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Devices
  • Backup Practices
  • Backup Software
  • CD & DVD Backups
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • Data Recovery
  • Drive Failure
  • Drive Imaging
  • E-mail Backups
  • Events
  • External Drives
  • Flash Drives
  • Guest Bloggers
  • Hardware Failure
  • Humor
  • Mac Backups
  • Mobile Backup
  • Network Storage
  • Offsite Backups
  • Online Backup
  • RAID
  • Removable Drives
  • Reviews
  • Storage
  • Tape Backup
  • Traveling Backups
  • Tutorials
  • Website Backups

Tags

Elsewhere

  • BACN
  • East Bay WordPress Meetup
  • Rhymes with Sketch
  • The Author-izer
  • WP Fangirl

Find Sallie Online

Backup Poll

When was the last time you backed up your computer?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...
  • Polls Archive

Tags

.MAC Acronis Amazon S3 annual archive backup Backup Bookmarks BACN Bart-PE Buffalo carbon copy cloner Carbonite CloudBerry Cloud Computing Coding Horror CrashPlan disaster recovery Dmailer DriveImage DriveSavers Dropbox DVD Flickr Ghost Google Docs Iron Mountain Karen's Replicator LinkedIn LiveVault Maxtor Memeo Mozy RAID Rebit reminder Retrospect Seagate social backup Spare Backup SyncBack SyncBack Freeware Titan Backup WordPress XHD year-end backup Zoogmo

Copyright © 2023 · Metro Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in