How do I re-index Storage Folders in Windows Live Mail under Win 7?

Hello, Koudgen!

I am glad my method worked for you and solved your problem! Yes, it takes time if the damage is extended; it works the best when it happens to notice the issue early...

About the disk space reasoning: when it happened to me, I had no disk space issues. I am not saying that this couldn't be a possible cause but not in my case though. I guess that it is possible to have more than one causes that trigger that malfunction.

That thing you mention with the increasing depth of 'storage/imported folders' is really annoying. I have noticed that myself and it is really painful when you have to navigate to all those clones to find where the latest version lies!

I have ended up that Windows Live Mail is really fragile. I am not sure if I 've read it on this thread or on another one, but it is said that Windows Live Mail should be treated gently, meaning that after you close it and exit you should always wait for some time before you re-open it or before you shutdown your PC otherwise issues may arise.

Best regards

Nick

Thank you Nick.   Somehow my email folders exhibited both problems discussed on this thread - always the same message body being displayed despite different headers shown, and "message not found".    I have no idea why this started to happen, though I note that I have kept the same email structure for 12 years across at least 4 computers and on changing computers exported from the old and imported to the new.   I noticed along the way that the "Storage Folder" / "Imported Folder" depth increased, and it was always a nuisance to have to shuffle things around afterwards to get the individual folders back to the first level under Storage Folders.   Yet a closer look seemed to indicate that although on the surface it seemed that the shuffling had achieved what I wanted, nonetheless the deep structure seemed to survive somehow.

I have a suspicion that the problem may have started because of shortage of "disk" space.   About 8 months ago I moved to a mini netbook with just 32gb solid state drive.   I have had capacity limit warnings, so maybe that's the cause.    Not that any software should get its database structure corrupted and just carry on as if nothing had happened.

Anyway, I followed your approach and it works well.   Only took 3 hours!!

I solved my problems, with this re-index instructions. I give a very BIG thankyou to FireDog.

(After reading lots of junk about how to delete those undeletable messages, asking to repair, uninstall and reinstall. I didn't repair the app, the problem was in the data).

I had diverse problems...

Problem A:

Some folders just didn't display any content. Not even "this folder is empty" message. But their properties showed they had XX messages. Of course, trying to empty deleted items was unsuccesfull with message telling "Could not delete... to try later."

Every time WLMail started it showed "Recovering message store...".

Problem B:

Delete a message was impossible. Due to the ·deleted items" folder was damaged.

I noted, "Shift-delete" worked fine, but "delete" won't.

Problem C:

Re-indexing as suggested in your post was not running because "the folder is in use".

So I recalled I readed in some other page to set advanced maintenance option "Empty deleted items folder on exit" to be set. So... I unchecked that option, because this one was preventing re-indexation.

My add to SOLUTION :=) wich worked!!!

Add to step 4. above:

Also make sure the "Empy deleted items folder on exit" option is unchecked.

Happy MessageStore re-indexing.

Javier

It seems that with your way, WLM is forced to re-index all the folders, therefore it worked!

most likely that's how it works.

However I believe that WLM on today should not have these problems, I mean, we are in 2015, is already available WIN10 and WLM is not able to make a simple e-mail recovery, that is absurd!

It seems that with your way, WLM is forced to re-index all the folders, therefore it worked!