OE 6, after compacting, emails disappeared??

Hello. First, I am posting this for a problem with someone else's computer, who is over 100 miles away from me, so unfortunately I can't just hop on and check things out. However, the problem is that they (computer is XP with OE6) finally said yes to the prompt that was coming up asking whether to compact files/folders, after which time, most if not all of their emails from various folders "disappeared ". At the least, I know this happened to the Inbox as well as some extra folders they had created. I know this did NOT happen to the Sent or deleted folders. I tried looking at the various few things I found to do on the web, looking in the stored folders directory (which the folders were obviously in there, and the .dbx file sizes in the missing email folders were plenty large to show that all of the messages should be there but they're not on the main OE6 screen) as well as simply checking View to make sure all messages are showing, which they are. I downloaded and tried that Macullan (sp?) recovery, but it didn't do anything. What else can be done/looked at here? I'd like to help out, but just don't know what else to do. TIA.

Chad

 

This same thing happened to my wife. Her inbox had 700+messages in it with 105 "unread ". She was cleaning up the inbox last week and then the inbox changed to only allow her to see 100 messages, starting from the oldest. As she deleted the older emails, newer ones would show up. Unfortunately, once she got to under 100 in the inbox, it changed again. Now she cant view any emails.
When she downloads the emails, it shows there are unread messages in the inbox, but if you click on the inbox, there are no messages.
The inbox.dbx file is still large so I know messages are there, but I cant view them.
Any ideas?
stomper

 

For $5 you could try the program DBXtract
http://www.oehelp.com/DBXtract/Default.aspx

But Steve R Jones' idea of looking for a large file named Inbox[1].dbx is good and free. You could try renaming it to Inbox.dbx (after first renaming the present small Inbox.dbx to anything else).
Or see near the bottom of this reference http://www.mindspring.com/~oe_oh/recovering_a_lost_message_store.htm

In the future when you keep many old email messages, it may be best, from time to time, to either delete or collect the desireable ones and put them in a separate folder.