The first rule when attempting Microsoft Outlook Express recovery or recovery of files when using the larger Outlook e-mail client is to never compact folders before backing up your stored file data. Both Outlook recovery and recovery of Outlook Express data is a relatively simple task if one does not institute the compaction option beforehand. When one compacts the Microsoft Outlook inbox several things are accomplished.
First all of the space used for deleted messages is overwritten with the data used for stored emails. The purpose of this is to constantly keep the size of the Outlook PST file inbox folder to under 2 GB. However as with any situation where we overwrite a file area on our computer’s internal hard disk drive once we put new data over the sectors that held the old the older information is no longer recoverable. Compaction squeezes all of the files into a smaller area by overwriting those messages and options previously deleted. But if the deleted information is actually still needed and if one hopes to use a data recovery tool to find that information the process must be done before compacting files and folders on Outlook and Outlook Express.