Suddenly lost all my emails in Windows Live Mail

Hi Gillyches,

Thank you for posting your concern here in Microsoft Community and we apologize for the delayed response.

I understand you lost some of your mails and the storage folders. For us to determine what may have caused this, we’d like to ask the following;

• Did you rename your account? If so, please provide the old and new account name with the estimated date and time you renamed it.

Note: If you are unsure if you indeed renamed your account or just added an alias, you can check this article Use aliases to add email addresses to your account to confirm;

• Did you try to close/deactivate the account before the issue occurred?    
• When was the last time you logged into your account?
• Did the data loss occur right after Outlook.com upgrade or was the data still there for a brief time?
• Are you  seeing the missing mails on a mobile device or the web UI, or a mail client program
• Please provide the account you’re having issues with.

You can also check this article Restore deleted emails in Outlook.com to see if you can recover some of the emails;

Here are the possible reasons why you can’t see emails:

1. If your emails were over 365 days old, you may have lost them due to inactivity even before you rename the account.

-         If your emails were over 365 days old, you may have lost them due to inactivity in the account even before you renamed the account. If you had Self-recovery of emails turned on in your account before renamed, you can try to recover some of the deleted messages yourself (Link to recover deleted messages is under DELETED folder), refer: Deleted email messages.

-         If you were accessing your emails on a mail client such as Windows Live Mail or through your mobile device, but didn’t log into your web account for over 365 days, you may lose emails due to inactivity in web account.

2. If your account was hacked and the hacker had already deleted emails in your account.
3. If the feature Conversation Threading feature is turned on.  
4. If you use Sweep to schedule a cleanup. 

We look forward to your reply.

Regards,

Roland

I agree. WHAT A WASTE. I am just trying to get some work done and WINDOWS SUCKED UP my whole day and lost ALL MY EMAILS. 

I reluctantly tried Windows Live when I got this computer. I will NEVER use it again. It is for amateurs.

Best advice I can ever give. NEVER UPDATE WINDOWS. If you computer is working fine. NEVER UPDATE IT - it is bound to mess up something. 

And forget about all the threats about security risk. Ten years of using window and I have never had a security risk. But I have lost plenty of data from their updates.

I would go MAC if I didn't have $5K of PC software. What a headache.

HELP!!!   HELP!!!!!  HELP!!!!!

I've had a hotmail account for more years than I can count...15 - 20 years?

For the first time ever, in the past 24-48 hours, I have been losing e-mails in moving them from my POP back to my inbox.

I used to consider this new POP function in the deleted folder an annoyance, but now I consider it a problem.  I want it disabled.  It sweeps too often.  I used to put emails that appeared in my POP back into my inbox until I could address them, with no problems.  But, just recently, when I did this, they did not reappear.  Subsequently trying to recover deleted emails did not help.  They have just disappeared into oblivion.  Completely.

I was able to find one or two in my apple mail since I knew what I was looking for, but the specifics of the others I cannot recall and in apple mail there are too many to go through.

PLEASE HELP!!!   PLEASE DISABLE POP!!!!!!!   Please help me recover the lost emails in POP!!!   Thank you for your help!!!

It seems that the moderators that responded do not understand the WLMail maintenance procedure and do not understand what it means to not have a Hotmail account.

After 100 closes, unused disk space is recovered.  You can change the setting by going to Alt, F, O, M, Advanced tab, Maintenance button, ..........

I am not clear on the maintenance procedure.

My guess is that a copy of 'MSMESSAGESTORE' is placed in the recycle bin and 'MSMESSAGESTORE' is rebuilt.   The rebuilding process was stopped which created your problem.

Hello Ron,

I have had this problem 3 times now. Fortunately, I have a back up to restore my emails from. I would like to stop Live Mail from recovering unused disk space. I followed your directions but when I go to the advanced tab there is no maintenance button. I do not know how to contact Microsoft directly and I am hoping you can help me further.

Thanks,

Tom