Outlook Express NAG

BeeJ wrote:

How do I stop Outlook Express from nagging me every hour or so to
compress its database?

You could do the compress.

Or you could Google for the registry hack to reset its counter and hope
that the message store doesn't get corrupted over progressive updates
and continued use.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2B&...2Bregistry

some hits:

http://www.insideoe.com/faqs/why.htm#compact
http://duitwithsbs.wordpress.com/20...e-message/

As noted in the 2nd article, other program exercising OE will increment
its counter so the prompt may appear before YOU have opened OE 100 times
because something else opened it. For example, besides Windows Desktop,
another cause for programmatic opening of OE is using the Fischer-Price
bobble-head Welcome Screen that shows your e-mail count. Something has
to go look at your e-mail account and that may be OE, so using the
Welcome Screen (instead of the Classic logon screen) uses OE to get your
new e-mail count which exercises OE and ups its usage counter.

Besides doing what the 2nd article mentions in deleting the key, and
since most suggestions have to leave it there and reset to zero, you
could save a .reg file containing a definition of just that registry key
and the data item with a zero count and then use "regedit.exe /s
<regfile>" as a shortcut in your Startup folder under the Start menu.
Then everytime you login the OE counter gets reset to zero. You could
schedule that command as a scheduled event in Task Scheduler to run when
you logon, or at scheduled times (and you don't even have to be logged
in at that time).

No compacting your message store results in eventually it getting
corrupted or exceeding its 2GB maximum size. Deleted items moved into
the Deleted Items folder have not been deleted. They've just been moved
into another folder so they still exist. Not until you permanently
delete an item using Shift+Del or deleting from the Deleted Items folder
or using a rule with the "permanently delete" clause is an item actually
*tagged* as deleted in the message store. You cannot see delete-flagged
items in OE's GUI but they still exist in the message store (in the .dbx
files). They still occupy space. That means you might have only a
single tiny message showing in some folder in OE's GUI but have gigs of
disk space used in the message store with thousands of delete-flagged
items. Not until those delete-flagged items are physically purged from
the database files are they really deleted (there are tools that can
undelete the delete-flagged items as further proof they are still in
there). The maximum size for the .dbx files for OE is 2GB. When you
add more items that exceeds that maximum, the database gets corrupted.
That's why you purge the database of delete-flagged items to get the
.dbx files under the 2GB limit (and why you cannot have so many items
stored in OE that even a clean .dbx file would exceed 2GB). Purging is
done by the compaction process. You compact to physically purge the
delete-flagged items still residing in the database files to prevent
eventual corruption of them by keeping them under the 2GB limit.

So continually ignoring the compaction prompt or hiding it by resetting
the counter or deleting the data item from the registry means you don't
compact the databases which eventually will result in their corruption.
So just go ahead and compact OE's message store. If you get the prompt
far earlier than your use of OE (how many times you opened it) then
start looking at what programs you installed that might be using OE or
whether you really want to use that Welcome Screen with its e-mail
counter that uses OE to look at your e-mail accounts (see
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304148) or whether you'll switch to the
Classic logon screen to eliminate exercising OE to get a count of your
new e-mails.

I am not even using OE. No accounts.
I'll try to uninstall it.

And yes I do the compress. Next day, it's back asking to compress
again ... and again ...

Wow!
I can't find the uninstall for OE'

I went to the OE folder and created a folder named Hidden.
I MOVED all the files in the OE folder to the Hidden folder.

Then as I pondered this, after a few seconds, all the OE files
magically got copied right back into the OE folder and the moved files
remained. I did it again and it restored the OE files again.
I have never seen this behavior in windows.

Is this a Trojan or whatever????

Windows would not let me delete the files in OE. Said they were in
use.
But would let me move, or at least so I thought.

In use? I do not see them in Process Explorer.

On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:20:31 -0800, BeeJ wrote:

Wow!
I can't find the uninstall for OE'

I went to the OE folder and created a folder named Hidden.
I MOVED all the files in the OE folder to the Hidden folder.

Did you already try going to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs,
Add/Remove Windows Components? Seems to me that would be how you
remove OE properly.