Exporting/Importing Outlook Express Messages

and Windows Address Book

Users may need to export email messages and the Windows Address book either for purposes of backing up the information or in anticipation of reformatting their hard disk and reinstalling Windows.

Exporting

Outlook Express offers the capability of exporting both messages and the address book, but all that is required is that they be copied (not exported) to removable media.  The average address book will fit easily on a floppy diskette, but in most cases the email messages will require a ZIP disk or CD.

The address book (*.wab) can be copied directly as a single file.  The email messages (*.dbx) must be copied within the folder they occupy on the hard disk.  If all the files in this folder are not present the import will fail.  One file, not accessed by the user, is Folders.dbx, which contains pointers to all the other files in the folder and it must be present.  Copy the entire folder to removable media.

Importing Address Book and All Messages

To import the address book, open Outlook Express and go to File|Import|Address book...  The dialog that opens will be preset to look for *.wab files.  Browse to the location where the address book was saved, click to select it, and it will be imported.  Similarly for the messages go to File|Import|Messages.  If Outlook Express 5 or later is being used, select Microsoft Outlook Express 6 and browse to the location of the folder of *.dbx files.  Obviously, for Outlook Express 4, that would be selected.

Importing a Single Message Folder

In the event that a message folder (displayed as a folder in Outlook Express, but actually a *.dbx file by the same name) is deleted or if it is desired to bring a message folder from another computer into an installation of Outlook Express, follow the instructions and viewlet titled "Moving a Single File into Outlook Express" which can be found here.