We have left the snail mail behind, now is the age of email and this statement itself is too old to mention. So, coming to the realistic approach of the describing and saying about this topic, checking emails daily twice or thrice has become like a habit for us. For a professional two places that he has to manage emails one at office and other one at home for his personal emails

Nevertheless, it is a fact that data is continuously growing with everyone including enterprises, home users or with any body that is serious about data, with the increase in data has brought an exceptional amount of increase in the numbers of emails that we have to receive daily or store in our emails clients. Microsoft Windows being the most popular operating system brought the popularity of its emails clients Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook.

People who use Windows still are ignorant about choosing the correct email client for them. Talking about those who have facility to download emails (POP accounts, Exchange or any mail server). People with free email accounts with yahoo etc. can check emails only through IMAP accounts by using web based interface, some common differences between Microsoft Outlook Express and Outlook.

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Outlook Express (An add-on, installed with Internet explorer)

• Stores emails in folders, and each folder is archived in a DBX file (inbox.dbx is for inbox and sent.dbx for sent folder).
• Has support for newsgroup, once subscribe to a newsgroup using NNTP protocol
• But as per Microsoft has lot security vulnerabilities, and has been left in Vista and being introduced as Microsoft Mail without DBX support

Microsoft Outlook (One of the components installed with MS-Office suite)

• One of the most popular email clients, a client designed for MS- Exchange
• Stores all emails, notes, calendar, scheduled items etc. inside single email archive i.e. .pst file
• Unlike Outlook Express DBX files, .pst file is more prone to data loss
• Recent versions have support for RSS feeds, and can be used as Feed reader (Outlook 2007)

This post is not trying to instruct people about the qualities and limitations of both these email clients, even if we are using Microsoft Windows, we might choose Lotus, Thunderbird or any other email client. However, most importantly we should be aware of the capability of the application that we are using and should read more about the correct usage of the software, lack of information leads to data loss.

People using any email client to POP emails from remote or local servers, should always backup their emails, mail servers where client mailboxes are stored should be a major concern. However, people tend to forget a very common thing, which is “Filing emails on a regular basis”. It has been seen people looking for recovering lost emails because their inbox.dbx reached to a level of 2GB. Therefore, what do we say the cause for data loss, limitation of Outlook Express for not supporting a DBX file more then 2GB or the laziness of the user, which caused his email client to become unresponsive?

To suggest,

• Regularly file your emails: - If it is inbox, create sub folders to store emails based on months or years.
• Plan and implement a nice backup policy with whatever resources you have. Either write DVD’s of your DBX files or .pst files, or store them in your external drives on a regular basis.
• Always know the limitation of your email client, in terms of its capacity to manage number and size of emails. Some of the email clients are not of industrial strength, so use right email client suiting your data storage requirements and needs.

Coming to the post loss scenario: - when we have lost our emails, and are looking to recover them.

For recovering emails from Outlook Express, would suggest

• Disk Doctors Emails Recovery (DBX), a nicely crafted small tool, but is very effective in recovering emails from corrupt DBX files, or recovering deleted emails from any DBX file from Outlook Express version 4,5 or 6.
• Advanced Outlook Express Repair, is also a good tool to repair your DBX files.

For recovering emails from Outlook,

• Disk Doctors Outlook Mail Recovery (.pst), another tool from Disk Doctors and this is one of the best in recovering emails, notes etc from corrupted .pst file.
• Advanced Outlook Repair, is also good in recovering emails from corrupted .pst files

One very funny thing, that I have noticed about with many recovery applications around (quite a few number), by running “scanpst” an inbox repair tool provided by Microsoft in background to repair .pst files in the event of corruption and has its own limitation in terms of handling recoveries from damaged or corrupted .pst files. It is amazing how easily they can violate copyright without doing a bit of research and designing competitive products.

Companies not having a background of understanding how recovery happens or how to design recovery applications, seeing any opportunity in the market start creating applications which they feel is a piece of cake, people who are seriously looking to recover their lost data should avoid such companies.

Shortly, would be posting top email recovery tools.