I have a friend (yes, I do have [i:2fnlzinx]some[/i:2fnlzinx] friends ) who very recently migrated from XP to Windows 7. It was a somewhat forced migration; his old machine finally died and he was unable to boot the operating system so he decided it was time to get a nice new PC which also included the latest Windows Operating System.

Problem was, he still had some important emails in Outlook Express folders that he wanted to retain....so who did he call? No,[i:2fnlzinx] not[/i:2fnlzinx] Ghostbusters!!

So, I connected up the old XP hard drive in the new tower and had no trouble accessing all the data. Next step was to find software (preferably free) that could extract the old emails from the Outlook Express .dbx database files and save them for us in .eml format.

I was very luck to come across a completely free solution which not only worked perfectly but is also fully portable......[url=http://www.mitec.cz/mailview.html:2fnlzinx]Mail Viewer from MiTeC Software.[/url:2fnlzinx]

After starting Mail Viewer; the initial interface is so bare it's tricky to know where to start. There are very few menu items and, despite a "Help" button being present, there are no help files at all. After a little scratching around it became obvious there was only one option available anyway; under[b:2fnlzinx] File>Open[/b:2fnlzinx]...so I tried that:
[attachment=1:2fnlzinx]MV 1.png[/attachment:2fnlzinx]

Aha, success!! Now we had a new screen which displayed a proper, functional user interface....much better!!
[attachment=0:2fnlzinx]MV 2.png[/attachment:2fnlzinx]

The top option was obviously the one for us so we selected that and then used the 'Browse' button (indicated by the little folder icon) to navigate to the required location. After selecting the [b:2fnlzinx]Inbox .dbx[/b:2fnlzinx] file, within around 30 seconds all 35 emails were then displayed in Mail Viewer's main window. From there we just selected all the emails my friend wanted to recover and keep, located the [b:2fnlzinx]save as .eml[/b:2fnlzinx] option, input a destination and.......voila!! There they all were complete with attachments.

I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised at how easily and effectively this portable freeware worked......highly recommended!!