Hello

Ok, so I read, studied and attempted ALL the suggestions and instructions
detailed in previous threads, inside.oe.com and oehelp.com, about restoring
the missing contents of my Sent Items folder from the .dbx in the store
folder. I would rather not have to pay for the DBXtract program if not
necessary, and also since I'm not sure either what caused my problem or if
that program will solve it.

Unfortunately, since I haven't been in the habit of regularly checking the
contents of my Sent Items folder, I don't know exactly when this happened,
and from reading here, the disappearing act could have been caused by any of
the usual suspects. In the past month, I did indeed recently compact
messages. I also recently installed McAfee, after years of Norton. I
regularly use Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware, and recently started
using a program called "Clean Up" (which found and removed tons of stuff, but
e-mails remained intact and untouched - however, my Recycle bin is now
empty). I did not see any .bak files.

I meticulously followed the directions written here for creating a new file
in OE, copying, deleting and then renaming corresponding folders in the
Store, and tried several times, but no luck. The original Sent Items.dbx (and
renamed copies) is about 250 MB, indicating it still has my e-mails in it.
But when I re-open OE, all that appears in the newly created folder is the
same five recent sent e-mails as are in the main Sent Items, less than 100
KB. Looking back in the store folder, it'll even show one of the newly
created folders, with copied contents, as 250 MB as well, yet only the same
five recent e-mails when I look in OE. So I'm thinking that they are either
not being "fully imported", something is blocking them from "being seen" in
OE, or something else is going on.

Also, I even tried to somehow get to these e-mails using Google Desktop
search, which indeed did seem to "find" them, but would just show sender,
recipient, date, subject line, and maybe the first sentence, but gave no
option to open or access the actual e-mails.

Oh, and I remembered that I have, though never used, Outlook on that
computer as well. I thought perhaps I might be able to import into that.
Tried, but successfully only imported everything else, but same problem.
Don't know if Outlook might provide some addtional recovery options, or even
if System Restore might "reinstate" them.

Any help much appreciated