If you still use older version you should upgrade it to the current one (1.01) as new releases may not support older email database format. This will upgrade stored messages and ensure smooth transition to the next version which is scheduled to be released soon.
Email message storage is the core of OE Classic and depending on how your messages are stored and organized affects the speed, upgrade ability and protection of database against corruption. Therefore, the whole next release is dedicated to message storage alone. It is major improvement to the program as whole user interface depends on underlying disk operations.
Here are some of the improvements that are coming:
- Identities support - Identities are like accounts - they hold complete program settings, messages and contacts. When you create a new identity, it is like you installed the program from scratch with all the settings reset to initial state. You may also share contacts among identities. Identities are protected with password and you can use them to easily separate tasks you do with the program - for example, you may separate work email from home email, you may create different profiles for different users, etc.
- All disk operations are faster - Much faster copying/moving messages from folder to folder (copy alone isn't even supported in current version), compacting folders (based on fragmentation), memory cache for frequently accessed disk files, etc.
- Transaction based saves - Transactions protect saves by storing changes that are about to be done to the folder system. If anything happens while messages (or other data) are saved or moved around, which even includes program crashing or powering off the system in the middle of write-operation, the database integrity will be kept. On the very next start, OE Classic will figure out what was messed up and restore all folders to last good state by cleaning up corrupted parts. And even if the corruption occurs, program still has mechanisms to restore database to working condition.
- Backups - In addition to transactions, messages will also be automatically backed up ensuring even more security and redundancy.
- (Almost) No limitations - Outlook Express had a limit of 2 gigabytes per folder. Some users had issues with that because when you reached this limit you could corrupt folders easily. Sure, we have a limit too, but it is measured in exabytes (that's millions of terabytes). With currently largest consumer disks of about 3 terabytes and the way how email and newsgroups are digested, this is no limit to worry about for a number of decades.
If you expect secure storage of your important messages, OE Classic most certainly does it!