Gee golly, weelittledrummer.

Are you sure it wasn't just:

1. I have set my wife to work doing this task.

2. We have an address book!

Congratulations - no matter what the method or the cause. And glad to have been of help (assuming it wasn't just wife's superior computing skills).

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Additional bits that may be helpful with Outlook Express.

You can "back up" your whole email bundle at any time by copying the Outlook Express folder to another location. It remains recommended that you always do a File|Folder|Compact All Folders immediately before making a backup.

Problem: If you restore email messages from a backup folder, all the messages in the backup folder will be added to your active OE messages, even if some of them are still there from before the backup, or are there from a previous restore. You will get duplicates of any messages from the backup that were already "in OE."

The .dbx files are database files, so each message has a "record number" to identify it within OE. Two records can be identical but as long as they have different record numbers one is as good as the other, and OE can (and will) keep them both. [Related to the duplicates found at mudcat immediately after the big crash-and-restore, perhaps?]

Some "real database programs" include a "purge" utility that can look for duplicates and remove them; but manually deleting the extras one at a time is the only method I've found in OE.

Each .dbx file will show as a folder in OE. You can choose which folders to restore and you don't have to restore all the folders that are in a backup.

You can only restore entire folders - - - you can't choose individual messages within a folder to restore.

You can export a single message by selecting the file and then clicking File|Save As. The message will be saved as a single file with .eml extension. When you double-click a .eml file, it should open in OE, and once open you can "Move to folder" to put it into an OE folder, but .eml files have to be "restored" one at a time.

Other email programs save the same file type, but often with a file extension .email. If someone sends you an attachment with .email file extension, you can change the "name" to one with a .eml extension and OE will almost always open it. (I assume that some people would need to change the .eml on an attachment you send them to .email to open your attachment, but haven't had a friend who's complained so some programs might open both/either.

You can "backup" a single OE "folder" by copying a single .dbx file from the working Outlook Express folder. People have reported lots of trouble restoring from single folder backups; hence the recommendation that you save your "backup" as a complete Outlook Express folder. Usually you can get a single folder backup back into OE if you create an empty folder in OE with the identical folder name that's in the backup before attempting to restore it, but a few people have reported that this doesn't always work.

You can also "back up" your address book by just copying the .wab file somewhere safe.

Note though that Outlook can't import a .wab address book, so if you might someday "move up" to Outlook you do need to save a backup .csv file of the data in your addy book. Vista does not contain OE, and adding it to a Vista machine is strongly disparaged by Microsoft. (That could be because OE works so well, and they don't want something like that on Vista machines?)

I haven't seen "duplicate names" when an OE Address Book is imported into OE, and I've cross-updated .wab files from one machine to another, and the from the other to the one to "synchronize" addy books on two machines. I can't say that it can't produce duplicate entries - just that I haven't seen that behaviour.

John