UnDBX - Tool to extract, recover and undelete e-mail messages from Outlook Express .dbx files.

Copyright (C) 2008-2011 Avi Rozen <avi.rozen@gmail.com>

Windows binary and source code archives are available at http://code.google.com/p/undbx/downloads/list together with corresponding sha1sum digests, which you can use to verify each archive's integrity.

There's no installer or setup program. Simply extract the distribution .zip file to some folder.

You should end up with several files/icons in that folder:

• the UnDBX executable undbx.exe
• the UnDBX HTML application undbx.hta, which serves as its graphical user interface
• this README in HTML format
• the GPL v3 license (COPYING)

Just double-click either of the undbx icons that you've extracted from the distribution .zip file. A simple dialog box should appear.

If you hit the Extract! button in the dialog box, UnDBX will extract e-mail messages (as individual .eml files), from all of the .dbx files in the Outlook Express storage folder, to corresponding sub-folders on the Desktop.

The same dialog box also lets you browse and select other input and output folders, and optionally enable recovery mode for corrupted .dbx files.

When run for the first time, UnDBX extracts all the messages as individual .eml files.

In subsequent runs UnDBX synchronizes the output folder with the contents of the .dbx file:

• new messages in the .dbx file, that do not correspond to existing .eml files, will be extracted
• existing .eml files, that do not correspond to messages in the .dbx file, will be treated as deleted messages and will be deleted

This way UnDBX can facilitate fast incremental backup of .dbx files.

The file names of extracted .eml files are composed from the contents of the From:, To: and Subject: message headers. The modification time of each file is set to match the date specified by the Date: header.

In recovery mode, UnDBX can open corrupted .dbx files (including files larger than 2GB) and recover their contents and undelete deleted messages.

Run the following command in a command-line window, to extract e-mail messages from all the .dbx files in <DBX-FOLDER> to corresponding sub-folders in <OUTPUT-FOLDER>:

undbx <DBX-FOLDER> <OUTPUT-FOLDER>

You may also specify a single .dbx file to extract, instead of a folder.

If the destination folder is omitted, the .dbx files will be extracted to sub-folders in the current working folder.

In recovery mode, UnDBX attempts to recover e-mail messages from corrupted .dbx files:

undbx --recover <DBX-FOLDER> <OUTPUT-FOLDER>

Again, you may omit the output folder, and you may specify a single .dbx file, instead of an input folder.

During the recovery process UnDBX scans the .dbx file for e-mail message fragments, and collects them into .eml files. Recovery can take a long while to complete, so please be patient.

In recovery mode UnDBX always extracts all the messages it can find, instead of extracting only those messages that have not been extracted yet.

Keep in mind that recovered messages may be corrupted.

Deleted messages are normally stored by Outlook Express in a special folder (e.g. "Deleted Items"), and can thus be restored by extracting them from the corresponding .dbx file.

Most of the contents of deleted messages still exists in the original .dbx file, as long it has not been compacted or otherwise modified.

In recovery mode, UnDBX attempts to undelete any deleted message fragment it can find.

NOTE: Outlook Express overwrites the first 4 bytes of every 512-byte chunk of each deleted message. In other words, some data is permanently lost when a message is deleted and there's no general way to fully recover deleted messages.

UnDBX current source code snapshot is available at http://code.google.com/p/undbx/downloads/list

UnDBX development source code may be cloned from its public Git repository at http://github.com/ZungBang/undbx/tree

UnDBX uses GNU Autoconf/Automake:

tar -xvzf undbx-0.20.tar.gz
cd undbx-0.20
./configure
make
make install

On Windows, this means that you need to install either Cygwin or MinGW.

If you got the source code from the source repository, you'll need to generate the configure script before building UnDBX, by running

autoreconf -vfi

Please report problems via the UnDBX issue tracking system: http://code.google.com/p/undbx/issues/list

Well, it works on my machine :-) [1] [2]

The UnDBX .dbx file format parsing code is based on DbxConv - a DBX to MBOX Converter, Copyright (C) 2008, 2009 Ulrich Krebs <ukrebs@freenet.de>

UnDBX contains RFC-2822, and RFC-2047 parsing code that was adapted from GNU Mailutils - a suite of utilities for electronic mail, Copyright (C) 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

UnDBX is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.