Windows Mail to Windows Mail - Where did my emails go???

[Guest]

I am an email packrat. I have (had?) every email since 97... Win 2000, XP,
Vista Beta... emails have always come along! I've never had problems backing
up, or importing them after... until NOW.

Yesterday I went from Vista Beta Ultimate to Vista Home Basic. Before
saying goodbye to Beta, I dragged-and-dropped the entire AppData folder to my
2nd hard drive AND my external hard drive. It took forever, but the folders
and emails seemed to be intact (also I did this before when I went from Vista
Beta to Vista Beta Ultimate a couple months ago). So, today, I bring up my
Windows Mail and import the folders. I copy my Inbox, my Sent Items, my
Deleted Items and am heading to my personal folders and I accidently hit
"Delete" on the folders - no problem, they're just in my "Deleted Items"
folder. I dragged them out, the folders were all there - with NO EMAILS IN
THEM.

I went back to my 2nd hard drive - the folder structure is all there with no
emails in them (even the Inbox, Sent Items, and Deleted Items Folders were
empty). Same thing with the external drive. NO EMAILS - just empty folders.


What can I do? Where are my emails?

 

[DGuess]

Search for *.eml

The e-mails are stored as separate files in which you can drag and drop from
Explorer into Windows Mail.

 

[Guest]

Thanks... that probably would have helped, but I found most of my emails
anyway... they were buried under a folder called "..../Recovered M
29/4-08-2007 baf/Local Folders".... Not very intuitive, especially
considering there are 3 other 4-08-2007 folders with various names that are
all empty...

Now trying to get Windows Mail to play nice with gmail. It worked yesterday
and the day before, but today they are fighting. UGGGH.