In the last decade, email has become one of the most common methods of communicating with one another. Some of us receive hundreds of messages everyday. While not all of the messages are important, not being able to access them can be frustrating. Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook – one of the most commonly used email clients – has a number of errors which can plague users.

On the bright side, most of these errors do have solutions.

Error #1: Error 0x800420CB

Most of us hate these cryptic error messages almost as much as the error itself. This one is no different. Generally, if you get this error message you are not able to open or read your messages – a highly frustrating position to be in.

The most common cause of the problem is corruption of the .dbx files associated with Microsoft Outlook. What causes the corruption is not always known.

You can correct the problem in just a few steps:

1. Go to “Tools” in the main menu.
2. Click on “Accounts.”
3. Select “Mail” from the tab options.
4. Choose “Duplicate Mail Account.”
5. Select “Remove”

Continue these steps until you have made copies of all the accounts and removed the old ones. This usually solves the problem. If not, use the Windows Search Utility to locate the Microsoft Outlook .dbx file and rename it.

Error #2: Unable to Delete Emails

Sometimes, you may find that not every email in our inbox is worth keeping or reading. However, there is another Outlook error that can prevent us from removing these unwanted messages from our inboxes.

Again, this problem usually stems from file corruption. In this case, a copy of an email that has been deleted already ends up in the deleted e-mail folder of the program. This confuses the program and prevents you from deleting other messages.

To correct the problem, you should follow these steps:

1. Copy all of the messages in your “Delete” folder to another folder.
2. Close your Outlook program.
3. Go to the Windows settings and allow hidden files to be displayed.
4. Search for the file known as “Deleted Items.dbx.”
5. Delete the file once you find it.

That should solve the problem. Remember to go back into your settings and re-hide those files so you won’t have to see them in all of your folders in the future.

Error #3: Unable to Receive Emails

Almost the exact opposite of the second error, this one prevents new emails from being received by Outlook. This one is definitely more frustrating than the other two because you will not have any access to the messages through the program until you rectify the problem.

The good news is that this problem is usually one of the easiest to eliminate, because its most common cause is having an overabundance of emails. Your email account can only hold so much data and when you reach that limit no more messages can be added.

To start receiving messages again, you can do one of the following:

• Delete emails you no longer need
• Copy emails into a different folder on your hard drive – outside of the Outlook program
• Increase the disk space allotted for your email account

Regardless of the error you encounter, remember that most can be solved easily and without delays of your email access.

Submitted by: Logan Albright Click Here to get your Outlook Express errors fixed for free. Logan Albright helps thousands of people optimize their computers through a proper computer check up. He is an authority on troubleshooting computer problems at http://www.pcaholic.com .