I have just loaded Outlook on a new notebook, Outlook 2002. I've used this version of Outlook since 2002, but alas that notebook did a big crash. The good news, I had all but the last two days of message folders on a back up drive, in a folder called "Exchange". Now, on my old XP home there was a folder called "OutlookFolders" which had "Exchange" and other details in it. So, all I need to do is copy the back-up data into the new computer's "OutlookFolders", but I can't find them, nor can the XP search. I do have folders maked to shoe hidden. Any help would be appreciated.

If they are extremely important you might consider the thumb drive and a CD. No storage media is full proof. Though I have never had a thumb drive fail I have heard and read about it. I have had storage CDs fail. I am not sure if e-mails would open for viewing when stored on an external media. E-mails by design are in a .eml format. When you save an e-mail to a media you might want to save them in another format, perhaps .txt or html. This would allow them to be read directly from the storage media rather than having to import them into Outlook or having to install another application for reading. DA

I use Microsoft Outlook here at home, and we use Microsoft Outlook at work. The problem you describe is as Anne suggested -- it's with your Internet Service Provider's mail servers. The only time I (or my husband) received duplicate mail downloads is when we're in Outlook here at home. As soon as I log onto the ISP's mail server (nearly every ISP has a way to log into your mailbox on the web if you're not at home, and you can certainly log in via the web even if you are at home), and start deleting the messages from the server, the problem stops. At work, I have never, ever received multiple downloads of the same message. I work for the state, and we used to have our own (Microsoft Exchange) mail servers. Now we're part of the statewide e-mail, so the servers are in the Microsoft domain. I was an Exchange administrator when we had our own servers, and I have administrative rights in the Microsoft domain. It's not Outlook that's causing the problem -- it is most definitely your ISP's mail servers.

Outlook Express is a free email program produced by Microsoft. Sounds like your original program might be corrupted, so you could try downloading a clean version (it's free). Hopefully the new version will copy across all the messages and addresses from your old version (fingers crossed), but it's a good idea to print out anything you might miss if it were lost. Then you can download the version of Outlook Express that suits your operating system (Windows or Mac). Many sites offer Outlook Express for downloading, incuding MS itself (www.microsoft.com). I used to use Tucows (URL shown below). Here is a link that might be useful: Tucows