How can I get back email inadvertently deleted from outlook express account

[2Easy]

Hi all –

I wanted to post a follow-up on the results of my email recovery efforts.

I was completely successful using the Recuva Freeware in recovering all 91 of my wife’s emails. I did however save them to a separate folder instead of importing them to the OE Inbox for fear of corruption.

That way she could review them using Windows Live Mail then save or delete accordingly as she chose.

The only change that might shed some light on this success is how they were lost in the first place.

As I described originally, I ASSUMED that she mistakenly hit the Ctrl/Delete combo and deleted all emails below where she was at the time. Obviously that was not the case as I know now that key combo doesn’t do that.

Upon further interrogation (yes, I actually listened this time) she had just clicked on the next email in her list to open it and by her description; “everything below that email turned dark blue, flickered a few times then disappeared.” Hence the reason for the fear mentioned above once they were recovered.

Whether or not that mysterious disappearance of a large group of emails falls into the “hard delete” category I have no idea. All I know is that I couldn’t find them in any of the files heretofore mentioned.

Thanks again everyone for your input. It was very much appreciated.

[rjay81]

You could try a search .. Start > Search > All files and folders > type in Norton Antispam > Search and see if it finds it. If not, just try antispam .

Thanks for the suggestion, Canuck. I recently switched from a Yahoo email account
(which had what you mentioned) to Outlook Express and I can't find any way to do
a search for a specific file. I've not had any reason to search for lost files in that
account before so can't find a way to do it now. I seem to be, when turning my computer on, directly into my Outlook Express email.

I also tried the Recuva again. There was a choice of what to look for so I checked
"emails from outlook express" and it brought up, after two hours, what looked like
encrypted files with no way of tellng what was in these files- thousands of them.

I'm still trying to find a solution to this and would appreciate it if anyone has any
ideas or any idea how to search for specific files with an Outlook Express email
account. Thanks again for everyone's help.

[Canuck]

I honestly don't know what more I can suggest, perhaps other members may have some ideas, but as mentioned above, if the gurus of computing say that after deletion there is no way of restoring from OE, I don't imagine "recover software" would do the job.

[DonnaB]

I doubt that these links will help. You may want to read them though. There is some good information in them that will give an idea just how deleted emails are dealt with. From my understanding, the more you use Outlook Express after deleting the emails the less likely you are to recover them as pointed out here:

When emails are deleted they are not removed from the mailbox (.dbx) file, actually the emails are still inside the dbx file as free space. Outlook Express tries to remove these deleted emails physically from time to time using its “Compact” feature. Compact option, removes the deleted files, which in turn will speed-up the Outlook Express performance, but the deleted emails gets wiped off making them irrecoverable.

Do not use Outlook Express to avoid any writing operation on the dbx files. Immediately run DBX repair software to locate the deleted emails and recover them.

Found in this link--> Recover accidentally deleted emails from Outlook Express

Here's a couple more links that may help:

How to Recover Deleted E-Mails from Outlook Express

The location of Outlook Express dbx files

If anything in those links help now after 3 days of trying, we will have witnessed a miracle. Time has passed and files have been written over.

Good Luck!

[abseh1]

This will not fix the issue posted in this thread....but Live Mail is a great backup for lost emails in the future

Live mail is a great option...I have it but only use it to find previous emails on the live mail server

My day to day use is Thunderbird with several Gmail accounts, and pop accounts, that I also, leave on the server

I have both imap and pop emails in thunderbird...5 different accounts to be exact

I can use the web based server @ will....

However, the pop server varies with the specific ISP
(many pop server ISP's (not all) will delete the email once it is sent to an email application like Outlook/Outlook Express or Thunderbird)

[rjay81]

Thank you, DonnaB and abseh1 for some very helpful information. Although it may not help the
current situation I have I will keep it in mind for future reference. Thank you all, for your help.

[abseh1]

Your welcome...Canuck really summed it up...unfortunately, when it leaves the server it is history

Unless you create a special folder and save the mail to the HDD