Reading Microsoft Outlook Express .dbx files

[Tim Peters]

[Greg Jorgensen]
> Both Outlook and Outlook Express can show the original raw message
> source, though it isn't obvious. In OE choose
> File | Properties | Details | Message Source
> (or use ctrl+F3 to do the same thing).

Yes.

> Outlook has a different path to the message source;

Sorry, I don't believe that -- but I'm easy to convince <wink>.  You may be
thinking of the menu item View -> Options in Outlook, but that only shows
the headers.  Or you may be thinking of context-menu View -> Source while
reading a msg, but that only exists for HTML mail, and still doesn't show
the raw stream (MIME encodings, etc).  There's nothing corresponding to OE's
(useful!) notion of "Message Source" in the Outlook object model, either.

> I don't have Outlook at home so I don't remember the path, but it's
> there.

See above.  One of OE's developers confirmed this for me wrt Outlook 98, but
that was about two years ago; if something fundamental changed in Outlook
2000, I haven't found it despite hours of looking.

> Outlook can save selected messages to a text file, which OE can't
> do.

Have found that of only marginal use, and only then for plain-text msgs.
Still the case that, to the best of my knowledge, while recent Outlooks deal
with msgs in std Internet format fine, it's not possible to get them back in
that format from Outlook (as the original questioner wanted).

friend-of-a-friend-at-a-workplace-notwithstanding<wink>-ly y'rs
    - tim