Vista - WLM stripping headers from some of my Hotmail messages

I recently installed Windows Live Mail. Unfortunately, after using the
program to access my Hotmail messages, I now find that there are missing
headers ('To:', 'Date:', 'From:' among others) and random carriage returns in
some of my emails. Furthermore, I have since found that the problem has
transferred back to the full version of WL Hotmail and is causing problems
there. Strangely, from what can tell, my mail is in a much better condition
when I view it in the classic version of WL Hotmail; *only* a few missing
'From:' headers.

So far, this corruption has been limited to the mail I had in one folder; a
folder in which I moved mail in WLM from the Hotmail 'Sent items' folder to a
'Sent Saved' folder within my Hotmail account (not a Storage folder). In the
past, I have always tried to move my sent mail to this folder to avoid the
30-day deletion rule Hotmail introduced.

I have tried the following to restore my mail (each of which has been
unsuccessful):

- Deleting the WLM database folder, and restarting WLM.
- Uninstalling and reinstalling WLM
- Moving the corrupted mail in WL Hotmail from the 'Sent Saved' folder to
the Inbox and original 'Sent items' folders. I can't be certain, but it looks
as if the process of moving the mail like this in WLM has possibly made the
data loss worse with each move.
- Disabled/Enabled my virus checker (Avast! v4.7 Home)

As a last resort, I used the WebMail and Webmail-Hotmail add-ons with
Mozilla Thunderbird to salvage all the other mail I could. The corrupted mail
again downloaded ...as corrupted mail.

For the record, I am using WLM build 12.0.1606 with Windows XP Pro SP2.

How can I get my WLM-corrupted Hotmail messages back to their original state?

Thanks in advance.

Try exporting then importing those problem messages.

--
Cheers,
Peter
(Windows Vista Home Premium with Windows Live Mail 12.0.1606)
"There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in
your philosophy." - Shakespeare
---------------

"Stuart" <Stuart@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C81B8E90-A257-400F-9D4B-915FC5739CF8@xxxxxx

.... or dragging them out to your desktop and back again.
--
Noel

"Peter.R" <Peter.R@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:81A1AEE8-942F-41BB-AE3F-646327EA9380@xxxxxx

Thanks for the tips guys.

Unfortunately, exporting/dragging them to the desktop and then importing
them back into WLM didn't resurrect the damaged emails. I also tried to
import them into Outlook Express, but the corruption remained. For
investigative purposes, I ran WLM in another user account, but it made no
difference; still a whole section of corrupted mail.

Here's a summery of the mysterious happenings with the problematic messages:

=== WL Hotmail (web classic) ===
- Message list OK
- Message headers (relatively) OK* #
- Message contents OK*
* unable to view source, to so can't investigate these further.
# only a few missing 'From:' headers. I guess I can deal with that – the
emails were from me.

=== WL Hotmail (web full) ===
- Message list OK
- Message headers corrupted (truncated & missing data ...which IS displayed
correctly in the message list!)
- Message contents OK

=== WLM (desktop) ===
- Message list corrupted (missing data)
- Message headers corrupted (truncated & missing data)
- Message contents corrupted (random carriage returns)
- When clicking on a corrupted message in the WLM message list, WLM writes
the current date to the empty 'Sent' date field (not the 'Date' field). Later
clicks on the listed messages do not update the date. It's as if WLM can't
find the 'Sent' date so writes the current date to fill a hole. In any case,
neither date header shows up when I the view the message's source text.

All very strange.

What I find most confusing is the fact that there's a discrepancy between
the state of my mail in different WL versions. Does Microsoft really keep two
copies of a user's mail on their servers; one compatible with classic, the
other for the full web and desktop versions? Maybe they just each process
mail differently; one system being more robust at dealing with corruption in
the mail database than the other.

If I can't get this resolved I think i'm going to have to drop Hotmail
altogether. There's no way I can risk something like this happening again.

Thanks again for the advice,
Stuart


"Ildhund" wrote:

After dragging a message to your Desktop, you could open it with Notepad and edit it before dragging it back into WLMail.

--
Cheers,
Peter
(Windows Vista Home Premium with Windows Live Mail 12.0.1606)
"There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Shakespeare
---------------

"Stuart" <Stuart@xxxxxx> wrote in message news:C643B92C-1826-4616-9C1E-ACF9C708DA7B@xxxxxx

Stuart, this looks to be quite a serious matter, so it would be good to get
the sequence of events clarified to see if it's possible to identify where
the fault crept in. The scenario looks like:
(1) You had a Hotmail account with one or more user-defined folders,
including "Sent saved"
(2) You installed a virgin WLMail and set up your Hotmail account
(3) Send/Receive synchronized your local account with Hotmail. Did your
user-defined Hotmail folders appear in WLMail? Or did you create them
locally ?
(4) Some time later, you moved messages from your local "Sent items" folder
to your local "Sent saved" folder. Was it at this stage that they got
corrupted, or did you not notice the corruption until later?

How many messages does the troublesome folder contain - dozens, hundreds or
thousands?
Are there any Recovered items under Storage folders (View > Layout > Folder
pane > Show Storage folders)?
Do you have logging enabled at Options > Advanced > Maintenance >
Troubleshooting?
--
Noel

"Peter.R" <Peter.R@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:#xVC1g5bIHA.5400@xxxxxx