One and a half hours? If it took that long, your folders were bloated, and
you haven't compacted often enough. It shouldn't take more that one and a
half minutes. I'm surprised OE worked at all.

With XP/SP2, Outlook Express prompts you to compact your folders after 100
closings which you should do. Lost mail is usually caused by disrupting the
compacting process, (such as turning off the computer before it has
finished), or having very bloated folders.

When you see the compact option, and select OK, and never touch anything
until
it has completed. A power change can cause you to lose mail also. If you
checked the Do not show me this again, OE will compact without you knowing.
If this is the case, post back and I'll tell you how to replace the prompt.

Why Mail Disappears:
http://www.insideoe.com/problems/bugs.htm#mailgone

About File Corruption:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/...orruption.mspx

Recovery tool, (if the messages are still there):

DBXpress is the best chance of recovery when run in disk mode:
http://www.oehelp.com/DBXpress/Default.aspx

And this is a very good option for the futu

Steve Cochran has added a button in his new version of OE Tool that will not
only Compact All Folders, but at the same time, resets the "Compact Check
Count" to zero whenever you compact manually. You will see the prompt again
if you do not compact before 100 closings.

http://www.oehelp.com/OETool/

It is still advised to check Work Offline before you compact.

A general warning to avoid losing mail in the futu

Do not archive mail in default OE folders. They will eventually become
corrupted. Create your own user defined folders for storing mail and move
your mail to them. Empty Deleted Items folder regularly. Keep user created
folders under 100MB, and Default folders as empty as is feasible.

Backup often:

Backup and Resto

http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/backup/

http://www.oehelp.com/backup.aspx

http://www.oehelp.com/OEBackup/Default.aspx
--
Bruce Hagen
MS MVP - Outlook Express
~IB-CA~

"David McGoldrick" wrote in
message ...
Last night (1/29/06) OE asked if I wanted to compact my messages to free
up
space. I allowed it to and it took 1-1.5 hours. Today, every message in my
Inbox from 12/13/05 - 1/29/06 is gone, deleted, not be found anywhere on
my
computer. Microsoft Service tells me that OE's compaction process randomly
deletes emails.

This is not compaction, this is deletion. Any idiot can delete their own
emails when they choose to do so. Microsoft tells me that they know that
the
random deletion is a problem and that the research department has been
working on this for some time. This is totally unbelievable. I can't
believe
that Microsoft hasn't issed a service pack to disable the compaction
process
if what happened to me is even possible they KNEW it.

The customer help department called it random deletion. In reality it was
every email that I had received (and not previously deleted) for the past
1.5
months.