If youâve forgotten your email password, perhaps because you let your email
program â Outlook Express, in this example â remember your password for you,
there are totally legitimate tools that will display what your email program
has remembered for you. Thatâs both convenient ⊠and scary.
In this video from an Ask Leo! webinar,
Iâll walk through the fate of Outlook Express and point you at the tool that
can be used to display what itâs remembered for you.
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Transcript
âI know youâre not a fan of Outlook Expressâ.
Well, I wouldnât say that; Outlook Express got a lot of people on to email. It has some serious problems and itâs not being supported anymore, so Iâm certainly not a fan of continuing to use Outlook Express. But Outlook Express is one of those programs that I think made a significant dent on the internet.
âIs there a way of recovering a forgotten password? I am using Yahoo.com and Windows 7. It will not let me reload Outlook Express. The message I get is that the software is no longer supported.â
That is correct; Outlook Express is not available in Windows 7. âWhere is Windows Mail or Outlook Express in Windows 7?â So this is the article that discusses the fundamental problem that you are seeing.
Outlook Express has been removed from both Windows Vista and Windows 7. In Windows Vista, there was an email program called Windows Mail that was made available instead. In Windows 7, there is no email program made available. The assumption is that youâll either bring your own or youâll download the Windows Live Mail which is the ânewâ replacement for Outlook Express.
Outlook Express itself will not run in Windows 7; the only approach close to getting it to even close to run in Windows 7 is to run a virtual machine to run Windows XP within Windows 7 or to get XP mode. If you have Windows 7 Pro or better, you can download something called âXP modeâ which is nothing more than a pre-configured virtual machine that allows you to run Windows XP inside of a window in Windows 7. Thereâs an article about that too if you actually want to consider going down that route.
Recovering your password â so recovering a forgotten password â I wouldnât relate that to Outlook Express. If you are using Yahoo.com for your email services, itâs Yahoo.com where you want to go to get your forgotten password. Typically, if you try to go to login to your webmail and follow the âI forgot my passwordâ links and/or instructions that follow, thatâs the way to get the password back.
The password â if youâve still got your Outlook Express machine running, your Windows XP machine that used to runâŠif youâve got your Windows XP machine around that used to run Outlook Express and itâs still available, it is possible (letâs see if I can remember the URL for this) nirsoft.net has some really interesting tools and it is possible toâŠright, they have something called MailPassView; this recovers the passwords of a bunch of different email programs including, it appears, Outlook Express.
So what you would do on the machine that is currently running Outlook Express, you should be able to run MailPassView and it will probably display the password for you.
So two things here: one, nirsoft is totally legit; Iâve used lots of tools from them before. Make sure you are getting them from nirsoft.net and not some other kind of shady download site. Let me make sure this actually goes to a legitimate page â thereâs the description, thereâs the system requirements, whereâs the download link? So there it is down at the bottom and those are both coming form nirsoft.net itself. Make sure youâre getting it from that location. As I said, they are totally legitimate. They actually have lots of nifty tools for password recovery and such.
Iâve got a couple of articles that talk about how you can recover passwords if youâve forgotten them but had Windows Internet Explorer remember them for you tools, here can usually pick that up as well. So, lesson one, nirsoft is legit; these tools are legit and safe.
Lesson two is, oh my gosh, anybody who can walk up to your computer and can grab a tool like this and see your password! And you saw on this list that it was a lot more than just Outlook Express; it was Outlook, and I didnât notice if Thunderbird was on the list, but it wouldnât surprise me.
This is a case where I want to reinforce to everybody who is not currently having a problem who understands and they remember their password and are not trying to recover it thatâs something Iâve said for a long time: if itâs not physically secure, itâs not secure. If somebody can walk up to your computer, they can have this utility on a thumb drive and stick it in, run it, and find out your password. Itâs actually worse than that when it comes to physical security, but Iâll leave that as a word of warning; call it frightening enough for the moment.
A lot of people donât realize just how easy some of these kinds of recoveries are. So, that is one way to potentially get your Outlook Express password back. Otherwise, Iâm sorry, your Yahoo! password back from having Outlookâs remembered password to be recovered for you. The other approach is to go to Yahoo.com and use the âI forgot my passwordâ approach.
Letâs see, Mark reminds me that the nirsoft utilities are great, but you might get a warning from your anti-virus program. That happens from time-to-time, but like I said, as long as youâre certain that youâre getting it from, directly from nirsoft.net. Then, you can be assured that what youâre getting is not a virus; it is a tool that can be used legitimately to do some interesting things on your system. There are a lot of nifty tools here.