Are you using an antivirus program set to scan email? If so, your message
store folders may have been overwritten with "zeros" vs. any real
information. Try opening one in Notepad or Wordpad and see if you can see
any recognizable portions of messages. If so, try saving copies of the DBX
files as soon as possible to another folder and consider using DBXpress to
recover the contents. You can read about DBXpress at www.oehelp.com

Corruption of the message store files can also happen if compacting is
taking place and you force the computer to shut down or use Task Manager to
terminate msimn.exe from running. See: The Other E-Mail Threat: File
Corruption in Outlook Express:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/...orruption.mspx

--
Jim Pickering, MVP, Outlook Express
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/pr...8-1171988A62D6
Please deliver feedback to the newsgroup, so that others can be helped.
Thanks.


"ionamic" wrote in message
...

I have quite a number of e-mail folders (about 20) with e-mail from
different clients in each. This morning, suddenly about 70% of my mail
was gone from these folders. The INBOX was OK as were the first few
folders. The rest were empty.

I found all of the DBX files and some of them are fairly large (20 to
40 MB) BUT, when I try to import them, they import but are empty. I
have tried opening them as text and all I see is some characters and
THIS line. "MSGCOL_FLAGS & ARF_WATCH"

How can these files be so big and yet empty? Does anyone know of a way
to get this stuff back...and what caused it to begin with?

(I am not set to view hide read messagesl)
IONAMIC


--
ionamic
Posted from - http://www.officehelp.in