Outlook Express Compacted My Email!

I have the same problem and cannot get rid of it. I too compacted and lost all my emails.

 

There's also this thread as well which I started when I had a problem a while back with a lost folder full of e-mails in OE.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=184152

The steps here helped me with my problem at that time:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918069

Yesterday my computer rebooted when it was in the middle of compacting OE mail. I don't know if there was some corruption in the OE folder it was compacting at that particular moment that caused the reboot or some other problem (There is a minidump log, but I don't have the foggiest idea how to read the darned thing, wish MS made THAT process a little easier!). However, I ended up with an empty folder, 372 Mb of e-mail gone. I went through the same steps I mentioned in that thread above and it actually took a couple of attempts. I had 2 .bak files in my recycle bin and restoring the second one worked, so it's likely that folder had been corrupted for a while. (Again, it was a folder with e-mail I hadn't looked at for a while.) If that had failed, I do have everything backed up on an external HD, so that would have been the next step.

The microsoft link Halo posted is excellent, I found it very helpful.

Good luck!