On my boss's computer she uses Outlook Express (on Windows 98). October 28th she came in to find out that her sent items box was completely emptied, it contained all the e-mails from July 1st of this year till October 28th..she desperately needs to get these back, is there any way to do this? She did not delete these emails and no one in the office is admitting to volitionally doing this either, it seems as if they just disappeared. Does anyone know how to possibly retrieve these lost mail pieces?!? We would be so grateful for your help. thank you.

Obvious question, but don't you have a backup?

yes the computer has been being backed up every few days or so...however due to this situation, we've discovered that somewhere along the line her CD-writer became useless and was no longer writing to the cdrw's she put in there. we've got a bunch of blank cdrw's.

unless you buy a copy of easy recovery professional (http://www.ontrack.com/) or something to recover your lost sent.dbx file, i'm afraid there's nothing you can do, even with special software, there's no guarantee that it will find it. i'm afraid it's just gone.

There are other options...I have not have very good luck with Ontrack in recovering email related files... Here are 2 to try that are very inexpensive... Bad Copy Pro has worked wounders for my in a wide variety of situations... www.jufsoft.com Final EMail is very good at getting individual emails that have been deleted or corrupted...I have NOT used it to recover the entire file... www.finaldata.com The BIG issue is this...do NOT write anything to the HD...it might write OVER some or all the sectors where the .dbx file now sits...that will make recovery MUCH more difficult... Good luck Steve

Two days ago when I started to work I discovered the same in my W2K Pro PCĄ Only me use this PC. In \Documents and Settings\<User>\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{GUID}\Microsoft\Outlook Express I remember my sent.dbx file size was around 30 MB. Now it is aroun 30 kB size. I don´t think it would be possible to recover that e-mails. Snif-snif. I was checking its cleanup.log file and it seems that its has been "cleaned" automatically by OE when it started. If you have more information please write me.