Today, I clicked off Outlook Express, and it asked me if I wanted the program to "compress files" to save space. Nothing was mentioned about deleting any files. I let it do the "compressing," which went on for several minutes. When I restarted my computer, all emails from the time between November 29, 2007 and today were gone. Everything in sent mail, all emails from today, and all emails prior to November 29 were still there. Does anyone have any idea what happened? According to friends of mine, the process of "compressing files" is not supposed to delete anything. Why did this happen, and is there any way to retrieve these emails? Thanks for anyone's help.

Apparently you are not the only one...

http://forums.techguy.org/2769142-post2.html

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=45001

Definitely follow Neverfly's links, but I will defend your friend. Compacting shouldn't delete anything. Normally when you delete something only the pointer is deleted. The actual data is still there. Compacting just cleans it up and keeps the active data.

I believe the data is "archived"--no longer in your mailbox, but in a compressed file somewhere.

Now, I can't remember how to get it back, but I did it once, years ago, when I used to use Outlook Express.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

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