You’ll find it on the old XP machine backup or hard drive, typically buried under a folder in your user account.

Either way, the data store that Outlook Express uses has been copied or saved somehow, and is now accessible on your new machine. In other words, you’ve recovered it from a backup or you’ve copied it to your new machine before you decommissioned the Windows XP machine.

On a machine that cannot run Outlook Express, like your Windows 8.1 machine, you have to make sure that the entire original Outlook Express data store is available. The second approach is if it’s already too late… in other words, if you no longer have Windows XP, but you do have a copy of the original mail store. With Thunderbird, for example, you can then move that data to Windows Vista, 7 or 8 even to a Mac or Linux machine. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have something that’s very easy to move to another machine and even to another operating system. Chose an email program that will allow you to import all of your Outlook Express email. I recommend something like Thunderbird, but I believe Microsoft Office’s Outlook will do, and Windows Live Mail might do as well. It’s absolutely the easiest solution that I know of.Īnd that’s this: on the XP machine that’s running Outlook Express, install another email program. My preferred approach doesn’t work for everyone, but I think it will work for you since you have your existing Windows XP machine. It’s very difficult to complete a data transfer successfully. It’s easy to have it not work at all, to lose mail, or experience all sorts of other associated issues that make it kind of a mess, to put it politely.

One of Outlook Express’s many problems is that it makes moving the Outlook data store very difficult. It’s a proprietary format and it’s very, very fragile. It’s time to move on to something that’s less buggy and actually supported.īut that does leave many existing Outlook Express users with a big problem: what do you do with all the email that you have stored in your existing Outlook Express installation?

How to reinstall outlook express xp sp3