Problem Identified & Resolved !!
His is mainly for Diane, who tried so much to help me on this problem. Of course, it's very difficult for anyone to help another person from far away, especially not being close to the details,etc. Having identified the source of the problem, I wanted to post back as a
contribution (however small).
Firstly, as to the direction Diane last sent me in. As I was having trouble importing/exporting OE6 e-mail messages, Diane questioned whether "
a utility would be able to extract the message." I explored that and came up with this:
1) If the problem is one of failure to read and recover messages for export to Outlook, a tool like
OERecoveryToolbox ($27) might be the ticket. This reads and recovers messages and allows export of messages (as *.eml) to a store folder. So how, thenn to get these into Outlook?
2) To name only two, utilities such as
Outlook Import Wizard or
EML to PST Converter (bother for ~$25) are necessary to port the (*.eml) messages into Outlook.
This seemed like a tall order and I didn't really know whether part of my OE6 Inbox.dbx was corrupted, and if so, whether something like OERecoveryToolbox (Step 1) would even help.
As a review, my OE6 Inbox contained 1764 e-mails mails running from 02/28/07 to the present. Imports (from Outlook) or Exports (from OE6) proceeded only to 05/09/08 (268 items; only 15%). I also tried moving e-mails from several days just before to just after the "choke" point, but no cigar: the same failure occurred.
If one goes into the Inbox and highlights mail pieces, one can "drag" them to a store folder and *.eml copies of the mail pieces will be created. This produced a similar failure: the process created 1463 eml files (1463 items were copied). Hmmm...
So then I got into
diagnostic mode and attempted a piecemeal approach to the problem: I decided to create *.eml files as described above a year at a time, noting in each time block how many eml files copied. I highlighted 2007 and dragged them over; this produced 190 files. I did the same thing for 2008. During this process, I got a strange Windows copy error message (
see attached). the message was confusing - almost like it didn't like the name of my story folder (
\OE6 Inbox). I noticed this error message didn't appear for subsequent years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013). So I decided the trouble somehow seemed to be among the 2008 e-mails. I emptied the store folder and went to the last e-mail before the "choke point" (05/09/08). This e-mail copied to the store folder just fine. I went to the next one (05/12/08 and tried to slide it over to the store folder. The aforementioned copy error appeared! I went to teh next one and tried the same thing; same result. This went on for several e-mails in this time series. Finally, I decided to open one of the problematic e-mails and I got another error message from OE (
see attached):
Message could not be displayed. This of itself was not necessarily a problem in my mind. I had seen this message trigger from e-mails gathered in an OE search, especially when lots of memory-hog apps were opened (and therefore RAM was being consumed). So I shut everything down and re-booted. I went into the OE6 Inbox and tried to open one of these e-mails. Same error message. Ah-hah! I thought I was onto something.
I stepped through this series, getting the same result (
Message could not be displayed). This went on until I reach the
2nd of 2 e-mails for 07/08/08; this e-mail opened fine and copied to the store folder w/o error or incident. So, for whatever reason, what appeared to be the problem was this:
(Oops - I now realize that these posts are limited to 4000 characters; please see attached for the end of the story...)