Advanced Outlook Express Repair

Though its face is not quite as instructive as some of the competition, Advanced Outlook Express Repair is as powerful and more important, extremely effective--the program recovered every e-mail from my two deliberately damaged .dbx files, though the demo limits you to the first ten messages.

Power users will probably like AOER's approach to the recovery process. All important settings are found on a single page, instead of scattered over several as with a step-by-step approach. But I do have a couple of minor usability gripes. The program defaults to recovering e-mail to the same directory in which the damaged .dbx or .mbx file resides. For the sake of neatness, I'd prefer that it store them in a subdirectory (though you can browse to another location). Also, there's no New Folder option, which might be more intuitive for less experienced users than creating one by typing/appending it to the supplied path.

I'd also appreciate it if AOER would save recovered messages to a single .dbx file rather than individual .eml files, and I'd rather see the Advanced Options tab buried in the menu where its rarely used settings wouldn't distract. But considering how effective the program was at recovering data and the relatively low price, consider my complaints of the exceptionally minor variety.

--Jon L. Jacobi