Thanks very much for your concern PA,

As it happens, it was a compaction catastrophe that started me reading
around OE generally and got
me to this forum.  I lost half my e-mail - all folders from p-z in
alphabetic order now empty -
which, from the reading around, I think may be the result of the pc being
shut down soon after the
prompt to compact came on screen when OE was closed (It is a great shame
that this prompt is not
accompanied by a suitable warning such as the ones you and others have
pointed out!)

Steve Cochran has sent me several links on the subject and I have now
installed OETool; OEQB; and,
DBXtract.

Others have filled out some background on the compaction process, and I now
know that this proceeds
by renaming dbxs to dbts and then packing the emls from the dbts into new
dbxs.  Presumably this
process was interrupted after dbxs beginning with 'O' had been repacked,
leaving the new dbxs from
p-z empty.

The 'empty' p-z dbxs still register as taking up a fair bit of memory (even
though DBXTract, and
viewing through Notepad finds 'nothing' in them).  If they were virgin dbxs
only just made in the
compaction process, I would have expected them all to register as the same
small size so it still
seems I have more to learn about this process and about my prospects of
recovering any of the lost
mail. For instance, where do the dbt files go when they are deleted and why
can I not find any in
searches ('Search'; GoogleDesktop; or 'Query the Indexing Service).

I now know that XP colours compressed files blue in Windows Explorer, which
may explain the
existence of new blue 'FoldersBasic.dbx' and 'DraftsBasic.dbx' amongst the
mostly black entries in
the most recent list of dbxs found by WE (the blue ones are not reflected as
box names in the OE tree). Should
all compacted files be in blue now and if so does this mean that the ones
that are still in black
and showing as empty are actually ones that have been compacted into new
blue folders which have
not yet been brought into use by Folders.dbx, and the ones that are still
black and 'full' haven't
been arrived at yet, and should themselves be compacted into blue folders?

OE is still prompting me to compact when I shut it. and I am very reluctant
to do this until I have
exhausted any recovery possibilities.  If half my folders are indeed empty
and the other half were
compacted before the crash, why does it still want to compact anyway?  If I
did allow it to compact,
would it finish some process earlier interrupted and maybe 'find' my 'lost'
mail by finishing
putting it in the right boxes and sorting out the 'Folders.dbx vs
FoldersBasic.dbx' situation.

If you can throw any  further light on this I would be most grateful.

Kind regards,

SteveH

Incidentally my virus scanner has deleted netski.zip 4 times and mydoom once
while composing this reply!