-=PCTechTalk=- Re: Outlook Express Question

Just some thoughts.  Please feel free to punch holes in them.  My lack of 
programming skills is STILL not helping so I expect to bleed at least a 
little bit from the punches.  :-))

If the disk surface has a bad spot or a series of bad spots that cause OE to 
read data incorrectly it seems unlikely to me that the bad space(s) would be 
so perfectly located as to impact only the "use this account to send from" 
address (and nothing else) and only in consecutive messages.  Especially 
since the file is very likely fragmented and message one is here and message 
two may be  way over there.  It would be more likely if the dbx file is 
structured such that line 1 of the headers of all messages are placed first, 
then line 2, 3 and so on.  That seems unlikely though since some headers are 
very short and some are very long and I think a structure such as that would 
require a relational database rather than a standard database and would 
seriously slow down the process of displaying the message.

If the dbx file itself is corrupted, it would also seem unlikely that the 
points of corruption would be as perfectly placed as described above.

If either of these situations existed I would think that consecutive data 
within a specific message or a series of entire messages would be having 
problems. For example it would start at a random point in a given message 
and stop at a random point in another message and the messages impacted may 
or may not be consecutive depending on the degree of file fragmentation.

Also, how would corruption that impacts a specific folder in a specific 
account pull up an entirely different account's email address when there is 
no reference to that address in the message headers?   Unless, two different 
message folders are corrupted and data was switched between them.  But 
wouldn't that put the incorrect data in the headers?  And cause problems in 
both folders?  Or could the corruption tell OE to look in one message/folder 
for the message being replied to but look in a different message/folder (or 
to a different account) to determine the account to send the reply from?

From watching OE compact folders on my system it appears that the process 
simply reads the records (messages) that have not been marked for deletion 
into a temp file or buffer of some sort then deletes the file and re-writes 
the stored records back to a file with the same name.

Compacting the folder, might fix the problem by changing the dbx file size 
and relocating the affected messages away from a bad spot on the drive.  It 
might also just move the problem to a different series of messages in the 
same folder.   I don't think it could actually repair any corruption in the 
data stored in the records though it might fix any damage in the physical 
structure of the dbx file since it is in fact creating a new file for the 
data.

If my thinking has any basis to it, what is left to look at is (in no 
particular order or priority):

--Human error ( though I can't think of what it might be)
--An address book in somebody's email client
--Corruption in the process that selects the account to send a message from. 
If this is the case why is it only one folder and a select few consecutive 
messages and only lasts a little while then goes away?

<couple of hours later...>

I just found this article at Tom Koch's site but it appears to be limited to 
News accounts and also to be fixed with SP2.  But it still might be relevant 
to this problem.  After reading it, I suspect something is causing OE to 
lose track of which account to use and automatically defaults to the default 
account.

http://www.insideoe.com/problems/bugs.htm#acctwatch

if broken, try: http://tinyurl.com/z5rvj

Don (with gauze pads and bandages waiting)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "GMan" <gman.pctt@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pctechtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 1:54 AM
Subject: -=PCTechTalk=- Re: Outlook Express Question


> Hi Don,
>    The line "... when the person hits reply, their from line shows an
> entirely different email they have" in Judith's original post explains the
> issue clearly to me.  It could just be clear to me because I have had the
> same exact problem several times since I started using OE many moons ago. 
> I
> know from my own experience with it that it's not limited to a certain
> version of OE, but I have never been able to establish anything resembling 
> a
> pattern that causes the problem.  To that end, I am also having a hard 
> time
> imagining how OE could make that mistake.
>
>    In my experiences with this, there seemed to be absolutely nothing 
> wrong
> with ANY part of the messages.  In fact, I even tested it on a PCTT post
> that I had already replied to previously.  The original reply (sent weeks
> earlier) worked fine, but the second test attempt brought up a different
> account of mine in the From field.  On that occasion, the problem was only
> affecting a small group of consecutive posts (by date) inside a single
> subfolder (my main PCTT folder).  Since they were old posts, I just forgot
> about it after a while.  But it later dawned on me that a bunch of
> consecutive posts inside a single subfolder in OE means that it could be a
> problem with a small part of the DBX file that is used for storing those
> messages.  It makes sense that those messages would be right next to each
> other in the DBX file since they came into the file at, or close to, the
> same time frame.  So, if it's a corruption issue, compacting them MIGHT 
> have
> the effect of cleaning up the issue.  Of course, I would first run CHKDSK 
> on
> that drive to ensure that the data is as clean as it can be before the
> compact process starts trying to manipulate them.
>
>    Finally, I have never done anything to look into this problem other 
> than
> experiment.            lol
>
> Peace,
> GMan
>
> "The only dumb questions are the ones we fail to ask!"


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