Importing Outlook Express in Windows Mail

Needed to recover from a crashed system running XP and Outlook Express onto a new PC running Windows Vista which comes with Windows Mail and I had had a file level backup to recover from.

The goods news is it's quite simple and works, as long as you don't needed the mail profile which you'll have to recreate as it's stored in the registry and thus wasn't accessible with a file level backup.

1. Create a directory under the current user's Documents, such as Documents\OEMail. This directory needs to be within the user's space, such as under Documents, in order to prevent possible UAC permissions problems.
2. Copy all the .dbx files from one Outlook Express Identity into this directory, ensuring that folders.dbx is included.
3. You need to check that you have write access to the files, doesn't make sense I know but that's MS programmers for you: Go to Edit Select all in Windows Explorer and select all the dbx files. Then right click on the selection and choose Properties and ensure that the read only attribute of the files is unchecked.
4. In Windows Mail go to File Import Messages and choose Outlook Express 6 format and choose to import from a directory.
5. Then use the Browse button to browse to the directory of dbx files. Make sure that when you set the directory that what is listed in the path is correct (NOTE: Vista can put the wrong path in here sometimes, so instead of c:\mypath it puts c:\mypath\mypath, so check the path to verify that it is correct, and if it is not correct then fix it by clicking the Browse button a second time and then leave the selection blank and clicking Okay.).
6. Then select the files from which you wish to import messages and click Import, by default it will import all folders, which in this case included some 9,000 deleted items!