mail compacting

[Guest]

I have a question about Windows Mail. I know in Outlook Express, sometimes
when the compacting occurred, items in the Inbox and other folders could be
lost. This happened a couple of times to me. Can this still be an issue
with Windows Mail? If so, how can I make sure this won't happen again?

 

[dev]

/rosemary4754/ said:

I have a question about Windows Mail. I know in Outlook Express, sometimes
when the compacting occurred, items in the Inbox and other folders could be
lost. This happened a couple of times to me. Can this still be an issue
with Windows Mail? If so, how can I make sure this won't happen again?

Use a back up utility. There are several incorporated into Vista.

 

[mikeyhsd]

since there has been a MAJOR redesign of the message store it is highly unlikely it will happen.
to be safe, you should NEVER leave items in the INBOX.
compacting is set to 100 closures of WM\when installed.
and NEVER, NEVER stop the compacting once it starts.

(e-mail address removed)@sport.rr.com

I have a question about Windows Mail. I know in Outlook Express, sometimes
when the compacting occurred, items in the Inbox and other folders could be
lost. This happened a couple of times to me. Can this still be an issue
with Windows Mail? If so, how can I make sure this won't happen again?

 

[Raul]

Hi

The loss of data in OE6 was due to SP2 available with Windows. I don’t see
the issue happening in Windows Mail because the format as well as the data
storage engine have changed

HTH

 

[Sinner]

Hi

The loss of data in OE6 was due to SP2 available with Windows. I don't see
the issue happening in Windows Mail because the format as well as the data
storage engine have changed

A really strange thing happened to me on the way to this discussion. In the
more than 5 years that I've been using WinXP and OE, I've never lost a
single piece of data to anything but my own mistakes, i.e. formatting
without making a current back up.

 

[Frank Saunders, MS-MVP OE/WM]

Hi

The loss of data in OE6 was due to SP2 available with Windows. I don’t see
the issue happening in Windows Mail because the format as well as the data
storage engine have changed

It was NOT due to SP2. The problem was a result of the DBX file structure
which was introduced in OE5, which was quite fragile. It is not a problem
in WinMail.

 

[Steve Cochran]

A really strange thing happened to me on the way to this discussion. In
the more than 5 years that I've been using WinXP and OE, I've never lost a
single piece of data to anything but my own mistakes, i.e. formatting
without making a current back up.

That's not very encouraging, given your nickname. <G>

steve

 

[Steve Cochran]

Just to elaborate on what others posted, the new message store format saves
the messages as individual eml files and there is then a single database
that holds abstracted message information (such as subject, author, date,
etc) for all the messages. In OE the database file for a given folder held
the messages as well, so if the database or file got corrupted, then all was
lost for that folder. The difference now is that there are no messages in
the database, so if it gets corrupted, then it may not work, but the
messages will no longer be lost, as they were in OE.

The database file still requires compaction to get rid of wasted space from
time to time, and that can be adjusted via Tools | Options | Advanced |
Maintenance.

steve