Outlook 2007 - where are my old emails

I am using Outlook 2007 as my email program attached to my AOL account through IMAP.

I was somewhat familiar with outlook from my company machine and thought it would be a good choice.

I am loosing older emails from my folders, particularly my inbox. I have autoarcheive turned off and had been moving the most important emails manually to an archeive folder. Most recently there were a couple of emails that I had flagged for follow-up for something that needed to happen in February. When I opened outlook today they were gone. They are no longer in my 'inbox', they are not in the 'archeive' folders and when I perform a search for them they are not located anywhere.

Is this something that Outlook is doing or is AOL deleting them? I really need to stop this before I loose something real important.

Please not too technical, I can make my way around a computer just enough to be dangerous but I do know when to stop.

Thanks

 

So ..........

Educate me just a little. If I move the items that I want to keep to my archeive folders, will that then save them to my machine and prevent them from being deleted from AOL's server?