Illegal operations messages

If you get illegal operations messages, your inbox email files are corrupted. To correct this problem, delete your inbox and let the mail program recreate them. The downside of this solution is that all of your stored messages are also deleted.

To fix a corrupted inbox in Windows, follow these steps:

  1. Locate your inbox files by looking in your email program or searching for the inbox files using the search function provided in your operating system. For example, you could use Windows Explorer to search for the files if you are using the Windows operating system. In Outlook Express, for example, the directory where email files are stored is found by clicking Tools, Options, Maintenance, Store Folder.
  2. Save all the mail that is in the inbox to another folder, or the mail will be lost once the inbox is deleted.
  3. Delete all of the files you find. In Netscape Mail, you also must delete the inbox.snm files. In Internet Mail, you also must delete the inbox.idx and inbox.mbx files.
  4. Return the mail to the inbox after your program recreates it.