For people that are not familiar with it Incredimail is an email program which is very similar to Outlook express but with more features. One of the very useful feature of it is when you want to transfer all your email addresses, emails and contacts etc. to a new computer. The inbuilt features make it simple to back up and restore everything to a new computer.
This is not the first time I have had problems with Incredimail, it works some of the time then one day you will switch the computer on and there will be a problem with it that will prevent it from opening. For the last few months this has been happening more and more until about 4 days back when the program would just not open up. I tried to open it for a few days with no success, I then searched Google for Incredimail problems as I was trying to find a solution. One of the posts I found in the Incredimail forum said that the problems are caused by Incredimail 2 and that version 2.5 was stable and did not have the crashing problems. I found the link to download version 2.5 and on the download page it said that you do not even need to back anything up, simply install the new version and all emails, contacts etc. would not be affected.
As I could not open Incredimail 2 up because there was something seriously wrong with it, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to the newer 2.5 version. I clicked the upgrade button and it got half way through and stopped working, so I downloaded the full 2.5 version and installed it onto my computer. After a re-start I opened Incredimail and found loads of messages that it had downloaded from Hotmail and Gmail, but the ten years worth of emails (many of them company emails) had disappeared as had several folders containing important emails.
At this point I tried system restore and tried to restore the computer to before I installed version 2.5 but that did not work. I disabled anti-virus software and tried again, but got the same error message. At this point I navigated to the folder that was apparently preventing the system restore working and renamed it by adding a 1 to the end of the folder name. I then tried again and got the same error message, so then I rebooted in safe mode and tried the system restore and it failed again. As you can imagine it took considerable time to do this because of the time it takes for the computer to try and restore- but fail.
Of to Google I went again and searched for Incredimail 2.0 to 2.5 problems and stumbled onto a page in their forum with a few tips, one of which involved navigating to the IM folder which stores the emails and much of the data for Incredimail. After backing up this folder in two places I installed Incredimail onto my laptop and imported one of the backup files that I had just created. This worked with some success and some emails were visible as well as some folders but not all of them. Luckily I found a post in the Incredimail forum where someone was having major problems and they suggested reverting back to version 2.0 and luckily left a download link to it.
I downloaded version 2.0 and uninstalled version 2.5 on the laptop and to my surprise all of my emails and folders where visible. I now just had to do the same on the desktop computer and then import the 10GB of data again.
I’m sure that over the years I have wasted at least a week of my time messing about with Incredimail, it’s a shame that it does not work as intended because when it first came out it was really useful. I can’t believe that the company that makes Incredimail still has certification as a Microsoft partner, surely with all the problems with Incredimail you would think that Microsoft would distance itself from them!
So far today Incredimail has not crashed, so perhaps the version 2.0 that I have recently downloaded has a bug fix installed.
Never used it.. but googling does not suggest any kind of authorisation/licencing from Microsoft ?