Besides the spam that you get on a daily basis there are actually real email that you would like to keep, and you consider important enough that you might need them for reference some day, however storing those important e-mail on your hard drive is risky. So what can you do? I ‘m glad you are reading this article because you will find out.



Generally in most email programs you have the ability save and archive those very important emails buy copying or transferring them to a removal storage media such as a CD or DVD. With those emails now transferred to a removal media you can delete them off of your hard drive, and in a sense, doing yourself two favors.

1. You just gained a little more space on hard drive, or gained a ton of space if you have a ton emails that you were saving.

2. Now you don't have to worry about loosing those e-mails if your hard drive were to ever crash. One point for you and the computer gods none.

Microsoft Outlook Express stores email in what is called a .dbx file. Each folder in your Outlook Express contains a DBX file, for example, all of the messages in your primary inbox will have a DBX file and sent items.dbx will have all the messages in your sent items folder.

Depending on how many emails that you want to save and archive you may want to think about compressing those messages making them smaller in overall size, thus using less space when you're ready to transfer them to your removal media. However, this process is optional, CD are relatively inexpensive and unless you have been saving email since Windows 3.1 there is a good chance you will be able to transfer all of your archived messages on to one 700mb CD.

Ok let's get started! These instructions are for Outlook Express, if you are using another email program your will have to consult that program manual.

1. Start Outlook Express.

2. In the top menu bar click on Tools.

3. When the window drops down click on Options.

4. Once you click on options there will be another window that will open in that window click on the Maintenance Tab.

5. Almost all the down at the bottom of the page right above troubleshooting you will see “click Store Folder to change the location of your message store” now click on the Store Folder button. Once you have click on Store Folder the Store Location window will appear.

6. High light the path name in the Store location dialoged box by cling and dragging over the path name text, the press CTRL C to copy that text to your clip board.

7. Close Outlook Express.

8. Right click on the start button on the bottom left hand of your computer, and then click on Explore. Highlight the current text that is in the address field and press CTRL-V to paste the path that you copied from Outlook Express, and then press Enter.

9. Click on the very fist file and then press CRTL-A to select the all the files at once. Now you drag all the files into your software burning program or you can right click and then click Send To and then click the drive that contains your removable media. The Send to option can be a little confusing at times and you may just want to use the software that come with CD Recorder as it actually may be a bit simpler to burn those files on to your CD.