Suddenly lost all my emails in Windows Live Mail

Anonymous

Question Summary

Other Windows Live Mail issues

Please provide your impacted Email address :

elaine_******@ntlworld.com

Did you receive an error code or message?

Please enter the error code or message you received

None

Which version of Windows Live Mail are you using ?

Version 2011 (15.4.3538.513)

Choose your Operating System version :

Windows 7

Additional Details

Opened Windows Live Mail yesterday afternoon and all my emails had 'disappeared'. My Calendar, Feeds and Contacts were all in place. I had not deleted anything.

I looked in the Recycle bin and found a huge 20mb (ish) file called 'MSMESSAGESTORE' which I restored although, at the time it told me the file already existed so it recovered it to a secondary location.

Now if I search for '.eml' files I find some or all of the emails under

C:\Users...........\Windows Live Mail\Storage(1)\Recovered items..............

I do not have a Hotmail account.

Please help me recover these emails.

Thank you.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

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.

[quote user=Maudestan]The only thing that happened was that as I 'Shut Down' the PC the message 'Recovering unused disk space' came up which happens every few weeks.[/quote]

When WLMail closes some housekeeping is performed. You should always close WLMail several minutes before turning off the computer.

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.

Follow this procedure and see if you have recovered all of your emails.

1. You will first need to select the Show hidden files option.

a. Open Windows Explorer and click Organize / Folder and search options. Click the View Tab.

b. Place a check mark in the Show Hidden files, folders and drives option.

Click Apply/OK.

c. Close and restart Windows Explorer.

2. Open the WLM Store folder.

a. Navigate to the following folder.

C:\Users\your name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail

(Where 'your name' is the name of the account that you use to logon to Windows 7)

b. In this folder you will see all of the WLM storage folders. Each email account will have its own group of folders.

c. Any general storage folders that you created will under the main Storage Folders item.

3. Make a copy of the Windows Live Mail folders previous version.****

a. Right clickthe Windows Live Mail folder and select Properties / Previous Versions Tab.

b. After the list populates, select a version of the folder with a date and time prior to when the folders were deleted.

c. Click the Copy Button. In the Copy dialog box, select the Desktop as the location to place the copied folder.

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44 additional answers

Anonymous

2012-03-19T11:16:46+00:00

Hi Ron

Thank you for your clear and intelligent response! Very much appreciated.

By the time I received your reply I had dragged over various folders from the recovered Storage folder from the recycle bin. This was not only tedious but also has not convinced me that I have all the emails back. In addition to this I seem unable to 'Find' any emails now so I guess I've lost the indexing that is made, presumably when emails come through in the normal manner.

As I am running a business I had to get on with something, as you know the other moderators weren't really helping. I have run through your advice and see that I do have a previous version from the day before it all went horribly wrong.

Can you advise me please - if I do the previous version restore you have recommended will I lose any new work or, even, completely confuse WLM?

I am keen to ensure I have all my emails and also to be able to 'Find' emails from the past.

Thanks once again.

Elaine McGowan
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Anonymous

2012-03-07T22:13:55+00:00

Hi Maudestan,

Please try to reconfigure your account in Windows Live Mail and check if the issue will still persists.

Please follow the steps on these articles below.

**How to configure a Windows Live Hotmail account in Windows Live Mail** ******How to configure/re-configure a non-Windows Live Hotmail account in Windows Live Mail** Note: Please refer to the type of your account in the above link (non- Hotmail or Hotmail). To reconfigure account, first you need to remove email and then add.

Thanks,

Windows Live Neil S.

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Anonymous

2012-03-07T12:24:41+00:00

Hi Julie

Thank you for your response, your comments make sense and I have checked that my account properties are correctly setup.

However, the problem is not that emails have been sent to the server and then not passed to my Windows Live account on my PC.

I do not have problems receiving emails. I receive around 60-70 emails a day into two seperate email accounts. I then have many subfolders in my Inbox which I use to file the emails that I need to keep. These include emails from suppliers & customers, notifications, invoices, orders etc. These emails go back several years.

On the day in question I used my Windows Live Mail as usual in the morning then had a meeting so switched the PC off. When I turned the PC on two hours later and ran Windows Live Mail my Inbox and all the subfolders were empty! I had not deleted anything and, indeed, if I had physically deleted all the items it would have taken an extremely long time to do so. This was not the case.

The only thing that happened was that as I 'Shut Down' the PC the message 'Recovering unused disk space' came up which happens every few weeks. I think that during this process the emails are saved to a temporary file until the recovery is complete but, on this day, the PC shut down before the emails were 'restored'. Please see my original post regarding the huge file in the recycle bin.

I believe something has gone wrong within the Windows operating system functionality and this has cost me an lot of time to repair.

Thank you for your comments.

Elaine
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Anonymous

2012-03-06T23:06:55+00:00

Hi Elaine,

Please access your account through the web to check if the recovered emails that you are looking for are available online. One of the possible causes why your emails are lost is you are using an e-mail client or a third party spam filtering software to access your account. This often happens when using the Pop3 protocol to retrieve your mail and the option “Always leave a copy of the message on the server” is not selected. There are also security programs that include e-mail filtering systems. There are instances when the software configuration causes false positives causing valid messages to be either sent to the junk folder or deleted altogether. To know more about the possible causes of lost mails, please check the article below.

**Emails are missing from your Windows Live Hotmail account**

Thanks,

Julie

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