PCA Forums

I've been working on my parents laptop for the past few days while I'm home trying to solve why it won't allow me to delete emails from the inbox (or any box). The delete button on the keyboard does nothing but temporarily turn into an hour glass (split second) and the delete button on the toolbar does the same thing. If I press shift+delete it'll prompt me to permanently delete the email. Delete key also works in any other situation outside of OE6. Even deleting characters in new emails. I also can't right click an email, select delete, and have it go away.

I'm on the verge of losing my mind with this issue, as I've tried reinstalling OE6, which might as well be a worthless solution anyways thanks to Microsoft. I've found a couple of different solutions in my research like the permissions some how getting changed to read-only for the folder that stores outlook express emails, I've unchecked that with no reward. Another has said to removed and add again the delete button to the toolbar which also didn't work. I'm starting to get the feeling that my original notion that a virus is responsible is the only thing left.

According to them the issue started shortly after receiving one of two emails sent from a friend who forwards a bunch of garbage on to them. I know this sends up a red flag, but I tried to ignore this for the initial diagnosis to rule out potential biased solutions.

They run Symantec Antivirus and it's up to date.

ie

Fount this:

Thanks DoubleHelix. I should have included that in my post.
Okay Brian W. Here are the instructions for getting to the message store folder.
This is pretty simple to do. Just follow the steps below. If you have any problems or don't understand something, please ask.

Open OE and save or move any messages you want in the Inbox.
Click on Tools>Options>Maintenance tab>Store Folder.
On the Store Location box, highlight the address by pressing the Tab key on your keyboard.
Press Control+C (both at the same time) to copy the address to the clipboard.
Click Cancel on all boxes and close OE.
Click on Start>Run.
Press Control+V (both at the same time) to paste the address into the command line and click OK.
The store folder containing all the DBX files should open.
Find the one named Inbox and delete it. When you next open OE a new Inbox will be created and hopefully that will solve the problem.

Source: http://forums.techguy.org/web-email/558048-outlook-express-6-can-t.html

The above instructions I think are a little confusing. To make it clear, if you follow them you will lose everything in your Inbox.

Those instructions will only work if the Inbox .DBX file is corrupt. HOWEVER I suspect that is not the case. I suspect the DELETED ITEMS.DBX file is corrupt. I would first follow the above instructions to find the OE Store Folder and delete the DELETED ITEMS.DBX file (note, you MUST close OE before deleting the file). Then run OE and see if you can delete any files. If you still can then move anything you need to keep out of the Inbox and repeat the procedure and delete the INBOX.DBX file.

If there's nothing in your OE mail folders you want to keep then you can simply delete ALL the .DBX files and OE will create new empty ones the next time you start.

Hope this helps...

It worked. Thanks a bunch, not sure how it became corrupted but I did do a virus scan and picked up a Trojan so maybe it had something to do with it. I swear sometimes computers make me want to swallow a knife after all I went through and simply deleting the file and allowing OE to recreate it made it work again.

OE6 just does it sometimes.. I am usually at one client a week doing this to fix it lol

^ What he said. OE6 is a database and databases are prone to corruption. Just having OE crash (as it's prone to do) can corrupt it's database files. Happens all the time. I get a client with one of those every month or so. Never happened to me personally but I think that's because I run my PC 24x7 and never leave OE running all the time. I open it, read my mail, and close it.

Well Office Outlook 07 isnt much better. Constant lockups and then it spits out "outlook is trying to recover your information" blah....blah... then have to manually kill it. Upon next usage outlook is SUPER slow, guess its verifying the pst file or something.