Export emails and attachments from outlook express

There is only one practical option (which I have used).  Mount a copy of Outlook 2002 or 2003 on the XP machine and Outlook will grab the emails from Outlook Express and make a PST file.

Use that to bring into newer Outlook and SharePoint.

It is extremely hard to separate emails from attachments since the attachments are encoded into the text of the email...

Not sure if that is what you meant, but it is what you said...

Once the attachments in an email (or an inserted picture) have been imported into a PST file, you should be able to separate. GIF images are hard to separate.

130 GB in Size, 1600 folders, does manual method works?

i fear that would take a bit of time... so no imo

>>> "There are 1600 folders and about 130gb in size" <<<

There will therefore be 1600 corresponding *.DBX files in that user profile's "Store Folder".  I assume you know where to find the user's DBX files and back them up somewhere safe before tinkering with them?
Tools menu > Options > Maintenance tab > "Store Folder" button > Right-Click path in field > "Select All" > Ctrl + C to copy path.

The path will usually be here:
C:\Documents and Settings\TheUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{Alpha-Numeric-GUID-Number-Here}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

There are some old utilities that allow you to extract individual messages from each of the DBX files to *.eml files and optionally also extract the individual attachments from each of those messages, but these programs usually run very slowly because (as Scott Silva mentioned) they have to parse the DBX file then the content of each message and then reassemble the message bodies and attachments from the encoding in which they are stored (BASE64 as far as I recall).

One such utility is MailView by Michal Mutl:
http://www.mitec.cz/
http://www.mitec.cz/mailview.html
http://www.mitec.cz/Downloads/MailView.zip
This is a standalone program that allows you to open separate *.DBX files and display the email messages found in an Outlook Express type of interface where you double-click to open each one separately.  Once opened, you can save out the message bodies only, the attachments only, or both as an *.eml file.  Doing this for 1600 DBX files would take an eternity, and the slowest part is when you double-click the line to open the message because it is at that stage that the reassembly of the message begins.  There are check-boxes against each message line so you can perform a bulk extraction.

Another old utility is Macallan Outlook Express Extraction by Ian Macallan:
https://pagesperso-orange.fr/macallan/
The program has to be installed after unpacking the 7-Zip file, after which the Windows GUI version is WOE5Extract.exe.
https://macallan.pagesperso-orange.fr/SETUP/OutLookExpressExtraction.7z
https://macallan.pagesperso-orange.fr/WOE5ExtractHelp.7z

This is similarly slow, but the benefit is that the setup package also installs a command line version OutlookExtract.exe.  Type OutlookExtract.exe -h to display the available switches that unfortunately are not very intuitive.

It is easy enough to create a batch file that executes OutlookExtract.exe with the desired command line options as it walks through each of the DBX files in a specified folder, but it would take an enormous length of time to extract the messages and attachments.

Your best bet is definitely to install Outlook on the same computer and allow it to import the Outlook Express emails, then do your migration elsewhere from Outlook.  What I cannot recall about this is whether it retains the folder and sub-folder hierarchy as would be laid out in the Outlook Express interface.  Outlook Express knows which of the user-created DBX files are master folders and sub-folders because the details are stored in the file "folders.dbx" and there are "flags" at the start of each of the DBX files that dictate the way the user has arranged all these folders.

An outlook import keeps the structure... But I believe you need outlook 2007 or older, maybe 2003. Maybe they can find an old copy of office 2003 somewhere on ebay, or such... I looked at some of the obsolete programs websites but did not see any available

https://www.mychoicesoftware.com/collections/microsoft-office-2003-1

Thanks for all of your input, we approached the client and gave them a price to do this and they went cold and communication stopped. Ill consider this case closed.

Thanks Simon

I hate when clients want expert work, but complain when you quote an experts price...