One of the most common issues causing Outlook Express *.dbx file corruption is not virus, but an antivirus scanning that you may configure to examine all outgoing and incoming emails. Email antivirus scanning is actually not important as most of the viruses are received in email attachments. Until you open the attachment, the virus cannot activate and Windows system scan takes care that this virus is removed. Rather if you configure your antivirus program to scan Outlook Express *.dbx files, it may corrupt them and cause unexpected symptoms. To fix such issues, it is necessary that you recreate these folders and recover lost emails from a previous backup. If restoring from backup is not feasible, you are suggested to opt for a Outlook Express Recovery solution.As one of the practical instances in support of such problems, suppose you use an antivirus software called ESET NOD32. The software scans the Outlook Express folders, but after this process is done, you observe that some or all of emails are missing from the folders displaying in Local Folders list. You cannot view these emails in any of the folders.

Cause

Emails disappearing is one of the typical symptoms of Outlook Express *.dbx file corruption that may occur due to antivirus scanning.

Solution

You can resolve the problem of DBX corruption using the general solution of recreating the corrupted folders. To do so, you need to follow these steps:

· Find out which folder(s) show the above symptoms and are corrupted

· Close Outlook Express

· To locate the corrupted folder, click ‘Start’ and ‘Search’ or ‘Find’ option

· Click ‘All Files and Folders’

· Type the name of corrupted folder followed by ‘.dbx’, for example Inbox.dbx

· Right-click the folder and click ‘Rename’ (and then rename it to different name) or ‘Delete’ (provided a backup is available)

· Start Outlook Express

In order to extract lost emails from corrupted *.dbx files, you can avail third-party solutions that can Recover Outlook Express. These software are exclusively designed to scan and repair OE files. The Outlook Express Recovery tools are easy to use products with an interactive design.

Stellar Phoenix Outlook Express Recovery is a powerful tool that repairs damaged Outlook Express folders created with Outlook Express 5.x and 6.x. The advanced tool can Recover Outlook Express and preserves the actual formatting and structure of the recovered contents. The tool is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000.