Hello, I have used webmail most of my life thus I don't have very much insight on the following topic. A friend of mine recently used Outlook for email with an email account thru their Dial-Up ISP. They recently switched to a broadband company and set up Outlook with the new ISP email address. Now this person would like to retrieve their old address book/messages but they can no longer dial into their old ISP's server. Is there somewhere on their PC where this information is stored. I've researched the topic but can't find a clear cut ansnwer. I looked for a .PST file but don't see anything like that. Thanks for any help,,,

all depends on who the ISP was. If it was aol, forget it, because you have to pay a fee to keep it going. Most ISP's shut everything down, it would've been good to save all the contacts and stuff before closing the accounts. Hopefully my advice will help you...Please post back with your results....thanks

It was actually a local ISP called SCRTC. So unless everything was manually saved the hard drive it isn't cached or locally backed up?

Check the following path for a *.pst file: C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\*.pst This is of course if your friend is using Windows XP. This directory may be hidden thus if you did an incomplete search on the HD you may not have come up with any results. Hope this helps.

I think there is 'no chance' of recovering that email. The data was undoubtedly wiped out when the ISP account was canceled. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

That's what I figured Hopefully my advice will help you...Please post back with your results....thanks

I will check for the hidden folder when I get a chance. BTW, the reason that we believe we should still be able to get the messages is because he could look at his old messages w/o connecting to the internet.