Tech problem with Outlook/Outlook Express (hard drive, email, gmail, installing)

[Lacerta]

Ok, so here is my convoluted mess I've made.

I have used Outlook Express for years at work, and always been told that the size of the folders wasn't important, that it was only limited by hard drive space. Apparantly that isn't true and it doesn't like folders larger than 2 gb. One of my folders grew larger than that, and got corrupted. When it tried to compress, it now reads as an empty file, even though the 2 gb still seems to be there.

I have already googled this and apparantly it is a known problem and I have tried a bunch of different things suggested. I have restored the .bak to a .dbx file and put it back in the correct location, no dice. I have tried renaming it, that didn't work. I have tried zipping it with Winzip and re-extracting it, which didn't work. I have tried importing it to Outlook, which worked with everything except for this file, it doesn't even seem to see it (Anyone know a way to specify which .dbx file you want to import, rather than just everything?).

I do have a backup file of my entire email folder, but it is from last September (I know I should backup more often, there just aren't enough hours in the day), so I'm really just trying to retrieve one file's worth of 7 months of emails. I think it is about 1000 emails total.

I still have the file, it still says it is very large, but neither Outlook nor Outlook Express will recognize that it even exists.

I've seen some people talking about DBXpress, which may be my next step, but I wanted to see if anyone else had any other ideas, since that program isn't free.

[mensaguy]

You might try installing Thunderbird on the machine and see if it will import those files.

[Lacerta]

Hmmm. Apparantly that is going to be a more complicated process than it should be. During the setup, it told me it didn't recognize my user name or password (which I know to be correct) and then wanted me to override a bunch of stuff, that I didn't want to override. I looked on my email carrier's website, and apparantly they have joined with gmail, because the Thunderbird link goes to directions to make your gmail account work on Thunderbird, but my account isn't gmail and the directions don't work.

I'll play a bit and see if I can figure it out. I also can't make the send/receive work on Outlook, and I'm guessing it is a similar reason.

Weeks like this one, I wish my company was large enough to have a tech department of our own

[dijkstra]

Have you tried restoring the files using "mail navigator?" Restore destroyed Outlook Express DBX files