Outlook Express is an email client that comes bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher, and facilitates home users to access their emails. It is the successor of Microsoft Internet Mail and News, an early e-mail client add-on for Internet Explorer 3.0. Built on open Internet standards, Outlook Express is designed for use with any Internet standard system, for example, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3), and Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP).
Almost every businessperson, employee or individual around the world begin their day with Outlook Express. They reach their workstations, sign into their account and download their emails.
The .dbx and .mbx files are used by Outlook Express for storing files. All files in Outlook Express Folder list are stored on our hard drive with the same file name but with the extension of .dbx for e.g. inbox.dbx. Together these are saved on a folder named as store folder which is located deep within Documents and Settings folder. It is a hidden folder.
Outlook Express has an automatic maintenance feature that is enabled by default. It is designed to wait until Outlook Express has been idle for several minutes, and then begin to compact your mail and news folders in the background. Well, these automatic settings can be changed under Tools| Options| Maintenance.
Outlook Express supports HTML e-mail and scripts. As a result, emails are commonly infected with viruses. Moreover, Outlook Express does not include a useful spam filter. But there are many third party tools and plug-ins that make up for that.
Versions of Outlook Express
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Outlook Express 4.0, which was included in Windows 98.
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Outlook Express 5.0, which was included in Windows 98 Second Edition (SE).
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Outlook Express 5.0 was included in Windows 2000.
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Outlook Express 5.5 was included in Windows Me.
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Outlook Express 6.0 was included in Windows XP.
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Outlook Express 6.0 SP2 was included in Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Outlook Express is a clean, fast, simple and pretty secure email client. But, everything doesn’t go as planned. The outlook express fails. Outlook Express is prone to a number of problems which can corrupt its files database, especially when the database increases in size due to increasing number of stored emails and during database compaction. This has led to a thriving market for programs that can backup, restore and recover corrupted files.
