Bernard -

Yes. Been there. Done that.

The thing missing from your instructions, and from Mickey'$, is that, at least for older versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, you shouldn't try to "archive" a single folder elsewhere on your machine, since to "import" it, an index file must be present with the archive or a folder with the same name must already exist to import into. They never tell you you need to save the index.

One of the reasons for the "compact folders" operation in OE is that it is what creates the index, so you may not have one if you don't include that step.

Newer versions apparently don't have the same problem, although I've not done any large-scale archiving with the export/import method since upgrading.

There also is no particular problem if you import back into the same folder structure as the one you archived from - so many people have never seen the problem, and I suspect that may be why it's worked well for you.

If, however, you archive all the email relating to a particular project, and remove that folder from OE, import will often fail without the index (at least for versions through OE5).

The workaround is to create a folder with the "target" name in OE before you try to import. (You can also rename the archive file to agree with an existing folder in OE.) It usually works, but not always.

Another "difficulty" with the standard export/import is that, since the folders are saved in database format (.dbx), you can't backup and restore single messages easily that way, so if I want the message about Chapter 17 on project 57-629X4, I would have to import the whole project folder to get one message (unless I was really clever and made hundreds of folders before exporting. To import a single message, it must be in a separate folder when it's exported.

A typical project for us, like the "dummy" one above, may contain 3 or 4 thousand email messages, so even if you have disk space enough to import, you've still got to go through everything to identify the one you want.

OE does allow a "save as" of an individual message file, and puts it in a .eml format that can be individually opened (in OE) just by double-clicking it - and you can save it anywhere you want to keep your archive. You do have to save each message individually, and the .eml format takes a lot more disk space than the .dbx, but the individual messages are individually recoverable (and can be copied individually back into an OE folder, if you need to.) The default filename is the subject line from the message, and if you manually append a date-time and sender id to the front end of the filename, they all come up in order when you list them in Win Explorer.

But the real point is - Mickey makes a big deal out of backing up, but their instructions are really not complete, AND they don't seem to realise that the only reason for backing up is that you might want to restore something. Their computers never actually crash(?).

John