Windows 7: Windows Live Mail: Lost Contacts

Hello,

I'm currently sharing this laptop with my son and he's not to picky on his downloads. Anyway, he must've downloaded something wrong, because i had to reset my computer to the factory settings. Hence, I lost all of my WLM-contacts. Is there any way to retrieve them?

Thx!

Hi Runezever, what account are you using in WLM?

It's telenet, a belgian provider. Now, I've already checked if it saved my contacts online, but it didn't. Or did you have something else in mind? Thx for the reply!

Heres how I use WLW. I have a Windows Live ID, me at hotmail dot com, where I keep my contacts. I use it to sign in to WLM then delete the account & add my Gmail details which are accessed using POP3. If I have to delete WLM for any reason my contacts re appear on sign in & my mail is still available by accessing Gmail directly.
If your interested in using my settings just ask.

If they were saved by WLM they would reappear the next time you sign in to WLM with your LiveID. If you weren't signing in, they may still be on the old hard drive if they were not overwritten by any subsequent activity. There is a free well-known file recovery utility here: Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download . If you reset your computer to factory settings, it obviously did not come from the factory with your contacts on it, so they may have been overwritten by the new system. The only way to know for sure is to see what Recuva makes visible.

Thanks roncerr, I found my contacts back! Really appreciate the effort from everyone.

Update:
I found my e-mails, but they're in a format my computer can't read. How can i read them, any ideas?
(I'll post a piece)

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Thx!

I don't know what you "found". Is that a *.eml file? What program opened to read it?