My main box is still happily running Windows XP (SP2) and my main email client is still Outlook Express (OE version 6.00.2900.2180).

I have thousands of emails stored in dozens of OE folders in an OE folder tree that goes about four levels deep. The single real file directory which contains all of these emails and OE folders consists of 571 dbx files and 832MB. I would like to convert all of the emails to simple text files and have them located in real file directories that correspond to the folder structure within OE.

Is there a simple way to accomplish this? My first thought was installing something like Thunderbird or other email client that is able to import OE dbx files, but if there's a better tool for the job, I'm all ears.

I am running Windows XP on my main box and Windows 7 on my newer rig (both are desktops). I have no other smart devices. I don't care about any of the attachments in any of the emails - just want to get the main body text into simple text files.

Thanks in advance for any help!
Jeff Roberson

Update: 2011-05-16 - Version 7 released today!

EditPad Pro 7 is now in the process of being beta tested. As an avid EPP6 user, I was invited to join in on the fun, but normally I avoid (like the plague) pre-release versions of software. However, in this case I decided to make an exception and give it a go because 1.) The quality of JGSoft products tends to be excellent, (so a beta release is likely safe/stable), and 2.) there are a couple features in EPP6 that have been bugging me and I wanted to see if they had been corrected in the latest version. We'll it turns out that all of my grievances with the older version have been resolved. Here are the complaints that I had with EPP6 which have been corrected in the latest version:

• The Ctrl+Tab keystroke, used to switch between documents, did not follow the most-recently-used order - it would simply move from file to file in linear order. Now this option can be selected either way.
• When opening/saving projects and files, there was only one "last used" folder that would come up as default. For my work-flow this was causing me headaches because I like to keep all my project files in one folder separate from the actual files associated with the project. The new version now independently keeps two separate "last-used" folders, one for files and one for projects.
• One of the cool features of EPP6 is that it keeps a separate set of options for each filetype that you work with. Settings like word wrap, auto-indenting, LF vs CRLF line terminations, show line numbers, etc, can be set independently for each file type. But the interface used to change these settings forced you to edit each filetype one at a time (and there are dozens of different file types). If you wanted to change one setting for all file types at once (say turning on line numbers), you had to do it over and over for each type one at a time. With the new version you can change common settings all at once.
• There was no way to quickly copy/paste a file's path/filename. Now you can right-click the files tab and get it into the clipboard.
• Regarding bookmarks, as I recall, one of the reviewers from a previous thread did not like the fact that EPP did not have a "Next-bookmark" and "Prev-bookmark" hotkey capability. These have been added and there is no longer a 10 bookmark limit.

So I was pretty thrilled to find out that all my complaints had been addressed. But once I started playing with it a bit more I got more than just a little bit excited when I discovered some *very* nice gems. One in particular that really stands out for me is the way it handles...

Matching brackets The already very powerful syntax highlighting capability has been enhanced to provide generalized nested bracket matching. But not just simple brackets such as curly braces, but anything that can be defined with regular expressions. As an example, when editing an HTML file, when your cursor is on an opening tag it is highlighted along with its matching closing tag. But, the really cool thing is that the Ctrl+] hotkey will jump the cursor back and forth from the opening tag and its matching closing tag. And it is able to do this with nested tags. It is VERY handy to be able to jump to a matching tag when working with HTML/XML markup. Very cool! If you are into regex, you can custom design your own coloring schemes to provide nested "brackets" for any file type imaginable. i.e. You could have "brackets" be defined as "do"-"while" or "if"-"then"-"else" or anything else that can be described with a regex.

These were the highlights for me. You can read more about other improvements on JGSoft's EditPad Pro 7 beta page.