In Outlook Express (OE), for archiving, what I do is move certain e-mails and old mail out of the "IN" folder to other OE folders. 1. Create new folders with the title of a sender that sends a lot of mail, such as "John Smith". 2. With the "IN" folder open and all "in" mail listed, click on the top of the "From" column to alphabetize it. That places all "John Smith" e-mail together. 3. Highlight older files from "John Smith", and then drag the highlighted e-mails to the John Smith folder. 4. Repeat process for other high volume senders. 5. Make a general folder for "old mail". NOTE: It's good to keep the "In" folder size small, as a small folder has less chance for becoming corrupted. ------------------------------ Backing up in Outlook Express: NOTE: OE keeps all of its e-mail in DBX files. For example, the Inbox folder is kept in the Inbox.dbx file, and the Sent Items is kept ins Sent Items.dbx, etc. NOTE: The best way to simplify back up is to have OE store its DBX files in "My Documents", and then when "My Documents" is backed up, OE is backed up. OE's "Help" tells how to do this, but it should be done before any mail is saved, or mail in the old location is ignored. To back up the dbx files, 1. First prepare your backup external hard drive, flash drive, or temporary folder for creating a CD by creating a folder in it with a name such as "OE back up dbx files". 2. Do a search on C drive for ".dbx". The result shows all files on C drive with a .dbx extension, which are all of your OE's dbx files. Highlight those files, copy, and then paste to your backup folder. There are other ways to back up OE. To find those ways, Google on the following terms, with quotation marks as shown within the brackets: [ "backing up" "outlook express" ] Woody ============================ _wfleet@zitomedia.net_ (mailto:wfleet@zitomedia.net) writes: Would someone please give me a step by step on how to archive email messages using Outlook Express. Thank you, Walt in Pennsylvania