Either you let your Inbox got too bloated, or you disrupted compacting while
in progress.

If you at sometime checked Do not show me this again when you saw the
compacting prompt, OE will compact without you knowing, and again, if the
compacting process was disrupted, mail will be lost. If you disabled the
prompt, post back and I will tell you how to replace it.

When you see the compact option, and select OK, and never touch anything
until
it has completed.

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

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

Recovery tools:

DBXtract:
http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx

DBXpress is the best chance of recovery when run in disk mode if the loss
happened during compacting. Also faster for large folders:
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 if you don't want to lose your messages 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.
--
Bruce Hagen
MS MVP - Outlook Express
~IB-CA~

"Patricia Coyne" wrote in message
...
HOW CAN I GET MY MISSING EMAILS RETURNED TO ME. I WENT INTO MY EMAIL BX
AND FOUND NONE OF THE MESSAGES THAT I HAD FROM A PREVIOUS OPENING OF MY
MAILBOX. WHAT HAS HAPPENED,PLEASE?