Anomoly in reported size of e-mail folders

[packman 0]

I'm getting some strange answers as to the total size of the various dbx folders in my Outlook Express application in Windows XP. I'm trying to do a backup of my pared-down e-mail folders and have started by doing a search (Run/Search Files & Folders) on the XP partition for all dbx folders. Windows finds and displays the results and all of the expected dbx folders are there, but when I look at the sizes of the Inbox.dbx and Sent Items.dbx folders, I'm getting figures of 9MB and 13MB. Yet, when I look in OE itself, each message is typically 10KB and the totals for those two folders are more like 110KB and 150KB. I'm trying to back up all the e-mail folders to a USB flash drive of just 64MB maximum capacity and those crazy figures in the megabytes range mean that the flash drive runs out of space. I'm using OE6.00.2900.5512, incidentally, under XP SP3.

 

Has anyone else met this problem? No matter how I look at the Properties of my dbx folders, I'm seeing erroneous megabyte figures. Or am I missing a trick somewhere?