Recovering lost messages from OE - help badly needed

[Jux]

In the middle of a standard OE6 compaction dh's computer crashed (we had a power cut). As a result he has lost about 4 years' worth of messages. We have a computer shop nearby and the guy there did his best (but had never had to do anything like it before) and seems to have recovered quite a few.

We have got some .dbx folders, most of which are quite large. Some of them we have managed to import successfully into OE6 but the major ones (and the largest) won't work.

We have got some .bak folders (which I've retrieved from the Wastebasker, but which I think were put there by the guy in the computer shop as the date modified is the date he was working on it). I don't know quite what to do with these atm, but don't want to chuck them.

What can we do? The most important folders are the ones which OE6 won't import (we have managed to open one of them with Mail Navigator and can see the messages, but can't get them into OE6).

I also would like to check that there are not any more messages which the Computer Man missed, or which might have been corrupted and could possibly be recovered.

We would be hugely grateful if anyone can help.

[CruelAndUnusualParenting]

There are a lot of recovery tools advertised. I have no idea how good they are. At least 2 offer free trials.

[Jux]

Sorry CrualAndUnusualParenting, that link just takes me to Google.

We have tried several free offer trial thingies; we can't tell if they work or not as the minute it looks like it'll do what we need it says we have to buy the real thing - which we won't do until we've found it actually does do the thing we want it to do, not something that just looks like it might, iyswim.

I really really need a fully fledged geek.

[CruelAndUnusualParenting]

Oops, don't know what happened to that link, it was just a Google search for '"Outlook Express" +recovery'.

I would hope that the free trials would allow you to see what they can recover, but not allow you to save them. If they don't show you what they can do, then there's no point to the free trial.

Unfortunately it's a pretty specialised requirement and you're unlikely to find anyone on here who's used them.

This article from MS recommends dbxtract.

[Jux]

Thank you, you're right about specialised. I haven't found anyone anywhere who has ever had to do anything like it. The forums give long reams of instructions but nothing I haven't already done.

dbxtract does look like a goer though - thank you; otherwise dh will have to be philosophical about it (and remember to back up his messages more often!).