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

Are you telling me to take over 4000 emails saved over 10 years and manually sort them back into the folders I have created over the last 10 years?

I am looking for a solution like, import them to one program (WLM created to fix this programing error in WLM) and then export them from that one and re-import to WLM.  Or WLM has seen this issue and updated the program so just re-import your back up and now it will work. 

I don't have the time to manually touch thousands of emails.  again....  Because WLM decided to put a litmit to the number of characters allowed in their file structure.

Only 4000 over 10 years? Consider yourself lucky. I must have about 500,000.

This problem is not just that you can't see the email. You also can't move it (in WLM) or delete it. So if it is spam you're stuck with it.

Here's what I've learned over the years about OE/WLM. For one, it gets worse as folders get filled up with too many messages. So it's a good idea to put them into subfolders, even if just by date. I have to create them for every 3 months as they get up to about 15,000 messages at that point.  I allow the current year to stay as one folder because it's a pain to have to search each quarter one at a time when I can't remember exactly when a message came in (or went out). That's one feature of OE I miss:searching a folder and its subfolders.

So the next thing I do, also since WLM won't seem to search the text of mails, is move ALL my mails older than a year or two into a separate folder on my hard drive and tell Windows Search to index that folder. I retain the subfolder structure from WLM in that folder for consistency. So if I am looking for something recent I use WLM, and if it is older I open Windows Explorer, go to the old email folder, and run a much faster search over from, to, subject and text of message. Just remember to close the search window when you are done, as it uses a lot of windows resources while open even after the search is complete.  My extra old mail folder is about 30GB and it finds my results in less a minute. Your 4,000 emails will be fond in a few seconds at most I'd wager, and you can search on text. Which also negates some of the need to bother organizing the emails anyway since the search will do that for you.

When I have a crash of any kind and WLM is open (which is nearly always), something will probably get corrupted in the index. When this first happened to me, I thought I had lost all my emails. Trying to recover them with various tools took weeks, and only recovered about 10% of them. So the only recourse I had was to convince myself I didn't need all those emails anyway, and move on with my life. About a month later, while poking around on my hard drive, I found all these other folders with weird names of random letters and digits, sometimes appended to my old folder names, sometimes not. The reason I hadn't noticed these is that they were deeply deeply embedded in my folder structure. It turned out WLM had recovered all the mails and made new folders for me. It just hadn't bothered to tell me about them! Also, I suspect it was doing the recover in the background while WLM was open for other things, and with the amount of mail I had, this process may have taken days or weeks. But they were there. Not always segregated the way I did, but that was secondary.

Here's the solution: in WLM create a new folder, with no messages. Then, in Explorer, find the new folder that just got created, and the old folder with the bad index (this step might be VERY difficult because WLM creates deep trees). With WLM closed, simply copy the files from the old folder to the new one. Once it's done, reopen WLM and give it time to index the new folder (this can take a while if you have a lot of messages).  They will all show as unread, and the From will contain both the name and email. But otherwise, all will be fine after that.

However, it may be that the bad messages don't show up in the new folder. This happens when the message is in the old index, but the file was already deleted.

I also have suffered from what seems like indexing issues in Windows Live Mail WLM and have some additional information that may be useful.

When using "Import" it appears problems are created or exacerbated by dragging or moving folder from "Imported Folders" to a higher location in Storage Folders. This is compounded over time because if you Import mail after a rebuild or disk crash or transfer to another computer, the folders will show multiple layers of Imported... - Storage... - Imported... - Storage... etc. even if they were actually dragged further up in the hierarchy.

Symptoms / Failure Modes (not always predictable) include:

• Clicking on any email in an imported folder displays a single email from that folder
• Clicking on any email in an imported folder causes "An error has occurred" and the open fails, and
• Emails in imported folder displays a different email from a different imported folder.

I should mention that in some cases dragging folders from "Imported" to other locations works fine, but you can see the "memory" of multiple layers of importing if you delete the folder then go look in "Deleted Items" where it shows multiple layers of Storage... Imported... etc.

One Solution - A way to break the chain and reliably Import into WLM

As mentioned above the emails are intact and fine. Only the indexing is hosed. So it is possible to purge this unsavory behavior in this way:

1. Make new folders in WLM with the same names as the old folders.
2. In Windows Explorer locate your *.eml files (Folder names in Explorer will have the same first 7 or 8 characters as Folder names in WLM)
3. Copy or Drag and drop the *.EML files into the newly created folder of the same name in WLM.

At this point your mail will be "normal" and not subject to whatever is flaky in the Import process.

Cheers!

I have found what I think is a better solution all round. It is similar to what I previously described, but instead of using Windows Search it uses a far superior program which happens to have a free version, though that one has some limitations I haven't figured out how to get around. As I write this I am deleting about 500,000 emails from WLM.

The program is MailStore, and the Home Edition is highly functional and free. It will take either (or both) the set of emails known to WLM (i.e., those in the storage area set uo for WLM), and a set of EML files in another set of folders, and create an indexed archive of all of them.  The archive is not in EML format, so in case this solution has issues in the future (like the product becomes discontinued), I keep copies of all the EML files, but outside of WLM. Now, when I want to search for anything, I go to MailStore and search there. You can search by subject, sender, recipient, date, text in mail, and even text in attachments (you need to tell it the file types of the attachments to index before creating the index, but their menu makes recreating the index a very simple button push anytime you want. And the searches are FAST! I search through about 1 million mails and get results in about 5 seconds when there are a few thousand matches and less than a second when there are just a few matches.

If the index becomes corrupt (which it hasn't), I can just rebuild it. Also, the archive is about 10% the size of the original eml files.  It seems to store the messages in another file format but sequentially, first 0001.dat then 0002.dat when the first is big enough, etc. This means the archive can be incrementally backed up quite easily and quickly. Also it automatically skips duplicate emails, which is great considering all the dupes I've got from every time WLM crashed and recovered mail into a new, inscrutable location.

The only trick is how to incrementally add new emails to the archive. The Home version (the free version) can add to the index based on a folder name, but the steps involved seem cumbersome to me: move new emails periodically out of WLM to an external folder, delete the emails form WLM, then do the archive update.  If you don't have a lot of emails like I do, maybe you just keep everything in WLM and rebuild the archive once/day or once/week from the WLM folders, to at least have a better search tool (yes, inside the MailStore search results you can click open and reply/forward).

What I'm doing, since this is for business and I have a lot of information worth archiving, is paying for the professional version (about $200) which includes a proxy server to move emails as they are sent and received into a new folder and then just add the new folder to the archive either via a scheduler or manually when I choose. 

And no, I don't work for these guys. I started on this quest a month or so ago when a colleague told me I should switch to Outlook because WLM was not intended to handle the volume of email I have, and in looking into it discovered even industrial strength Outlook has all the same corruption problems as WLM.

Very usefull thread, I managed to work around the WLM-import bug, thanks to RichTCT:

Here's the solution: in WLM create a new folder, with no messages. Then, in Explorer, find the new folder that just got created, and the old folder with the bad index (this step might be VERY difficult because WLM creates deep trees). With WLM closed, simply copy the files from the old folder to the new one. Once it's done, reopen WLM and give it time to index the new folder (this can take a while if you have a lot of messages).  They will all show as unread, and the From will contain both the name and email. But otherwise, all will be fine after that.

Import was also to create a new folder on a lower level than where the erroneous folder is, otherwise my problem was not solved. Apparently WLM starts indexing again when a new folder is found.

Like stated above, I also imported my mail quite a few times after switching to a new machine. This probably raises the chance to run into this bug.

I also found that all folder with a space in the folder name gave the problems as described above.

I'm quite disappointed that MS does not share a resolution to this bug, as more people have stumbled upon it (a found at least one other thread with the same bug)....