Its a huge issue that the MVPs have been fighting for years.

In addition to what Bear and Bruce posted, the only recovery technique that
may work at the moment is DBXpress. OE has a backup of the dbx file before
it does the "compaction", and once the compaction has done its damage, then
that backup is deleted. Since the messages in the backup are still on the
hard drive disk clusters when the file is deleted, DBXpress can go in and
read the entire hard drive and if the clusters haven't been overwritten, it
will recover the messages. It has been successful for many people, I'm
happy to say. www.oehelp.com/DBXpress/ And as I indicated, its the only
program that has this extract from disk feature.

/enough of today's plug G)

But for the future make sure you do points 2 and 3 he
www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx and backup frequently because this is a huge
problem for OE users.

steve

MS-MVP
Windows OE / WinMail

"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.