Most people tend to use their email clients as a filing cabinet of all the email messages they receive. Outlook Express is a free email client that is bundled with all versions of the windows operating system. This application allows you to send and receive email from your desktop instead of having to login to your email provider’s web page.

While I personally save individual messages I consider important in the html or text format in folders on my hard drive, you can backup all of your mail messages, account settings, message rules and your entire address book if you want to do so. Outlook express data consists of the following items:

Email messages - this is the actual text and header information of the email messages sent or received.

Account settings - this consists of all the information you entered when you set up the accounts such as the SMTP and HTTP server or POP3 servers, user name, login id, password, etc.

Address Book - this is the list of all the contacts and their personal information that you created

Mail rules - this data consists of the list of any mail rules that you created

This information is stored in several different locations on your computer. To do a complete backup, you must copy each of the files, folder and/or registry keys where the information is actually stored to a separate location either on your hard drive or a CD or DVD.

Backup Outlook Express Files

Email Messages

Email messages are stored in flat text databases on the computer’s hard drive. Each individual mail folder’s contents are stored in a different file. To back them up you must back up all of the database files. Perform the following steps:

• Start Outlook Express
• Click Tools, and then click Options
• Select the Maintenance tab then click on Store Folder
• Put the mouse pointer at one end of the box under the Your personal message store is located in the following folder box
• Press and hold the left mouse button, and then drag the mouse pointer across the Your personal message store is located in the following folder box to highlight the path to the file.
• Press CTRL+C to copy the location
• Click Cancel, and then click Cancel again to close the dialog box.
• Click Start -> Run then press CTRL+ to paste the path into the dialog box then click OK
• On the Edit menu, click Select All
• Then on the Edit menu, click Copy then close the window
• Create a backup folder by right-click any empty area on your desktop. Then click New and then select Folder
• Type Mail Backup for the folder name and then press ENTER
• Double-click on the Mail Backup folder to open it
• Right-click inside the Mail Backup folder window and then click Paste. Your mail database files will appear in the folder.

To restore the folders repeat the preceding steps selecting import instead of export.

Address Book

You will need to export the contents of the outlook express address book to a .csv file. This way the data is not only backed up but is also available to be imported into any application that can read .csv files which is almost all applications.

• On the File menu, click Export, and then click Address Book as show below

• Click Text File (Comma Separated Values), and then click Export as shown below

• Click Browse.
• Select the Mail Backup folder that you created.
• In the File Name box, type address book backup, and then click Save.
• Click Next.
• Click to select the check boxes for the fields that you want to export, and then click Finish.
• Click OK, and then click Close.

To restore the address book repeat the steps and select import instead of export.

Account Settings

Data about your mail and news accounts are stored in the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Account Manager. Navigate to this registry Key and highlight it. To save this data perform the following steps:

• Select Start -> Run and type in regedit as show below.

• Select File -> Export as shown below

• Type a filename such as outlook-account.reg and click on Save

To restore the account settings, right click on the .REG file you created and select Merge.

Mail Rules

The mail rules are stored at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities. Open the registry editor and navigate to the key just like you did when backing up your account data. Save the registry key to a file called outlook-rules.reg. This file can be restored using the same steps as discussed above.