UGN Security Forums UGN Security: Underground General Recovering Outlook Express messages

If you ever help me out once, please let this be it.

I had a lot of letters saved on hotmail, somewhere around 600. I configured Outlook Express to use hotmail so I could transfer all the files onto my computer, then delete them from hotmail so I'd have space. So I did that. I also set it up to synchronize my folder so that it would have the newest messages when I started it up.

I deleted all the files off of hotmail, and transferred them to my new computer. I just had to refomat it though, and forgot to export the outlook data so I lost them on my computer. However I did the same thing as above with a different computer, though I didn't transfer them over. I figured I could get on that box and get the letters. So I get on, and stop the sending and receiving before it can synchronize that folder and lose all my messages. I click on the folder, and see all the letters. Then it synchronizes, and they're gone. I'm thinking that because they were all there, they have to be on my computer somewhere in a temp folder. Is there any way to recover them? Please guys, this is really important to me.

Hi there, well i'm not sure but i'll try to help.

Yea you're probably right, they should be somwhere in your computer in a temporary folder, but as you probably know files don't stay forever in the TEMP folders, so i don't know about the delay of all this, so go to your windows folder if you're using windows, and then to TEMP and see there, but listen, this really a hard way i mean, it's hard to find em, you can also try by searching and see if you can get something.

P.S. I'd sugget you to move to another e-mail provider like Yahoo maybe.

If you reformatted and wrote over the sectors they were stored on they are gone forever. If by some chance you didnt you might want to try and look up some data recovery programs that can find deleted files.

yeah, what black^Pimp said... you can do a TEXT search. Search your entire harddrive for a string you remember in at least one of the letters. It'll take a long while, but it's thorough.