Ellen says when she clicks on an email in her inbox, it freezes Outlook Express
Yesterday I went to open an email in my inbox from a friend and when I clicked it, my Outlook Express froze completely. I can't do anything with it. It freezes up every time I try to open it. HELP! If anyone can help me you guys can. Thank you in advance - Ellen.

Our answer
Thanks, Ellen. A corrupted inbox really isn't that uncommon. That's one of the reasons why we included your question this week. Everyone would be wise to read this question/answer because a corrupted inbox will happen to almost everyone -sooner or later. When a file (an email) in your inbox becomes corrupted -you click an email in your inbox and everything freezes up. You cannot open it, you cannot read it, you cannot delete it, you can't do anything with it. So, what do you do with it? If you leave it in your inbox you may forget and click on it again, with the same frustrating result.

Here's the solution for you, an believe it or not it's really simple.

The first thing you need to do is move all of your good emails (that you want to keep) out of your Inbox. For now, let's create a new folder in which to move the good emails into. Right-click on the Inbox folder and choose "Create new folder", give it any name you like, for instance "saved-emails". Now, taking care not to touch the email that is causing problem, move the good emails out of you inbox my selecting them and dragging them to the folder you just created. If you want to move more than one at a time, hold down the Ctrl key while selecting multiple messages. Once you're sure you've got all your good email saved to the folder you created do the following:

Locate your Outlook Express message store folder. On the Outlook Express toolbar, click "Tools"--"Options"---"Maintenance" and click the Store Folder button. The file path your current store folder will be shown. Make a note of the location. Click Cancel to close the Maintenance dialog. Close Outlook Express. Now click Windows Key + E to open the Windows Explorer then navigate to the location of your Outlook Express message store folder. Locate the file called Inbox.dbx, right-click it and select "Delete". That's right. Delete your entire Inbox folder.  When you restart Outlook Express, a new Inbox.dbx folder will be created automatically, and your Inbox will show up in Outlook Express but it will be empty. The file (email) that was corrupt is gone. Now you can move the email messages from the folder you created above back to your inbox (if you wish).

You're unlikely to ever see a corrupted file in Windows Mail on Vista because the way folders and email messages are stored is completely different and reduces the chance of corrupted file so almost zero.

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