A customer (for the second time in about 6 months) sent a huge email from outlook express (about 40 digital camera attachments). This causes OE to become unusable.

I figure the procedure for fixing the problem is a bit to complex to explain over the phone.

Once I’m there, I see I can start OE, but as soon as I do a send/receive, it effectively locks up.

The problem is bound to be the outbox.dbx file, so I find it at:

C:\Documents and Settings\{userid}\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{LongNumber}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

(substitute {userid} for your actual user id, and {LongNumber} with the name of the folder at that position (which has a lots of numbers)).

To be safe, I rename outbox.dbx to outbox.dbxx

That clears the problem

I also educate customer on how to check emails sizes, as sending images usually involves having some “technical” knowledge of image sizes, and how to reduce them by changing resolution and image quality.

nowadays, its easy to attach 10 or 20 photos from a digital camera, without realising that each photo can be 1 to 4 MB in size… leading to an email that is 10 to 80 Mb in size (which most ISPs cannot handle for various reasons).

Now thats a nice idea for a new email client: have it automagically warn you if the email is bigger than, say, 2MB, and then offer to reduce the image size for you.

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