The two most common reasons for what you describe is disruption of the
compacting process, (never touch anything until it's finished), and bloated
folders. More on that below. Apparently, you did the first.

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

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

Recovery tool:

DBXpress run in Disk Mode is the best chance to recover messages:
http://www.oehelp.com/DBXpress/Default.aspx

And see:
http://www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx#4

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.

And 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~

"McJ" wrote in message
...
After closing Outlook Express earlier tonight, I got a window asking if I
wanted to compact messages. I clicked yes and it began the process, but
then hung up when it reached the Sent Items folder, possibly because I had
not cleared that out for looooonnnggg time. I wound up having to reboot
the computer, and, when it came back up...the Inbox was completely empty.
There were hundreds of messages in it before and many of the ones from
just that last few days were things I urgently needed to work on this
week.

Anyone know if there's a way for me to restore these lost messages? Can
they really be gone when I didn't delete them? Help!

JK