Issue with Re-image

I had to re-image my Dell Inspiron 1525 to factory settings due to issues with my mouse and keyboard. I backed up my C drive to my external hard drive. After re-imaging I went in to set everything back up and low and behold my Windows Mail data is NOT on my external.

Now, I know it says that once you re-image all data will be lost. But I also know that they always say on Cold Case Files and Forensic Files that you can never truly delete data from a computer. It is also there somewhere, you just have to know where to look.

Is there anywhere I can look for these lost emails? Some of them were very important. I did not have them backed up to my email server because the auto setting in Windows Mail is that they will delete from the server and I never realized that I could change that.

Also, why didn't they back up to my external with the rest of my data? If they are in C then they should have backed up, correct? They are in Users-AppData-Local.

How did you backup your data to the external drive? As you've stated, the data should be in C:\Users\<Account Name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail
(From this link: Windows Mail for Vista: Backup and Restore Data | IS&T )

Yes, it's true that data isn't truly lost - but the recovery of that data is expensive if it's been overwritten. Stop using the hard drive (even booting into Windows will cause further disk writes) and contact a company such as Data Recovery Software - Hard Drive Recovery - RAID Recovery - Runtime Software for an estimate.