John wrote:

I am unfamiliar with Hotmail but if your access to Hotmail from
Outlook was via IMAP the messages were never on your computer. You
were looking at them on the Hotmail server. You would have to drag
them to personal folders in Outlook to keep them.

Not exactly true. Outlook populates the client-side cache with copies of
what's on the server so that you can work offline and still access the
existing messages.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]