Windows Mail has lost "contact" with my email accounts and folders!

A crazy situation has occurred - my Windows Live Mail has lost contact with my two email accounts and their stores of messages. The message folders are still there in a "mail" folder but Windows Mail isn't accessing them. And neither messages NOR the two email accounts appear when I open the Live Mail prog. - it is just blank of content.

This has occurred because I was inadvertently running Skydrive on two computers, (one new just acquired), and backing up the same Live Mail folder simultaneously on both.

So Windows Mail seems to have done a lot of renaming of folders, and creating second, additional versions of folders. It looks like it renamed what may have been a "pop3.blueyonder.co.uk" folder for the main account's messages to "pop3.blueyo 6c8", which shows as just having been created today (when it is really years old) And it similarly renamed the other mail account's folder. Plus it created double versions of all the other main folders like Storage/ Your Feeds/ Outbox.

So a right mess.

I urgently need to reconnect Live Mail to its accounts and message folders for the sake of my business. How should I go about that?

(I't's easy enough to re-enter the accounts/account details - but I haven't done that yet, just in case I make the situation worse).

Please help.Many thanks.

P.S. I've got back the accounts. Hoping to restore order, I had deleted what appeared to be some surplus folders in my "mail folder" - including

1) 4 x folders called "blueyonder.9f1"/"..9f1.." etc which had empty "Inbox"/"Deleted" folders in them

2) 2 x other "pop3.blueyo folders" - also with empty folders.

So I restored these - and my accounts now register in Live Mail but with no old messages in them (though they're taking in new messages).

But I now have FOUR Livemail accounts instead of two. Two for

"pop3blueyonder.co.uk"/"pop3.blueyonder.co.uk"(1) AND another two for

"blueyonder. co.uk [mike].. and blueyonder.co.uk [rafe]

- the last two being created today in the doubling up.

Plus the "mail" folder now contains not just four but SIX "blueyonder"/"pop3blueyonder" folders!! (only two of them have the main sets of messages, of course)

Arrggh! What do I do?

.. do to get back the messages.

You could try this. Backup your mail before doing this.

1. You will first need to select the Show hidden files option.
a. Open Win Explorer and click Organize / Folder and search options. Click the View Tab.
b. Place a check mark in the Show Hidden files, folders and drives option>Click Apply/OK> Restart Windows Explorer.

2. Open the WLM Store folder.
a. Navigate to the following folder.
C:\Users\your name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail
(Where 'your name' is the name of the account that you use to logon to Windows 7)
b. In this folder you will see all of the WLM storage folders. Each email account will have its own group of folders.
c. Any general storage folders that you created will under the main Storage Folder item.
3. Restore Previous Versions
a. Right click the Windows Live Mail folder and select Properties > Previous Versions Tab.
b. After the list populates, select a version of the folder with a date and time prior to when the folders were deleted.
d. Select the restore option.
Hope this will get youur mails back

Hi,

Many thx for taking so much trouble. I probably didn't communicate properly though -

ALL my mail & folders for all accounts are in a "Skydrive/mail" folder created awhile back - NOT the standard Users etc folder.And I can see them all clearly in Explorer - and can see the folders with all my email messages.

A lot of double folders were created yesterday because I was running 2 versions of LiveMail simultaneously on old/new computers -incl 2 x Storage folders

The Previous Versions approach, if it worked, would take me back over 2 months - too long.

The present situation is that Windows Live Mail is nominating "blueyonder" accounts as its active ones, and isn't using the old "pop3.blueyonder.co.uk" accounts though they are listed there in WLM on the main page.

But the actual email messages are in a "pop3.blueyonder" folder within the larger Skydrive/mail folder. And all the "blueyonder" email message folders there are, of course, empty.

The ideal would be to tell Live Mail which of the (6!) pop3.blueyonder folders to connect to, rather than any blueyonder folders - is there any way of doing that?

Or - 2nd thought - is there a way of switching the active email accounts to be the pop3.blueyonder ones in the main WLM page - in which case - (perhaps?) - WLM would then connect to the pop3.blueyonder message folder ? (I hope)

Thx again.

I gotta think about this one, it has hurt my brainbox.

Hi,

Looks like there may be a "simple" but laborious solution.

I can drag the emails across from the "disconnected" pop3.blueyonder folders into "Inbox" etc. . It seems you can't drag folders across - you have to create the same name subfolder in Inbox first - and then drag the relevant emails.

I just did a quick test on 3 emails and a folder and they seem to stay there.

Can you advise?

1) Do you think this is ok? I don't want to make my "mail" folder even more complicated than neces. with its 12 message folders already!

2) Do you think I can first delete two of the email accounts? - and the relevant empty message folders? The new Blueyonder folders register as Outoing/Incoming ports of 25/110, while the old pop3blueyonder accounts have ports of 465/995 . That seems to be the only difference in their Properties. I'd like to delete the Blueyonder ones.

Thx for any help