Hey

well, i hope someone can help me.

back before i was smart enough to read news groups, i used outlook xp
and it was good. I was able to download all my mail on to my pc from
the pop3 or webmail places i went to.

over the years, i reinstalled office and outlook on many different
machines. eventually, i found an oppertunity to get office 2003, so i
did.

when it came time to move my old pst folders, i did it in the most
stupid way possible....i copied the file out of my old system and put
it directly in place of the new one that outlook had just created for
me. i figured, it was the same name, shouldn't be a problem, right?

well, it worked, for whatever reason. i seem to remember having to
run an upgrade on the PST file or something.

that system became unstable, and so i backed up my folders and
reinstalled windows and office yet again.

this time around, all my old mail from way back (office xp) was
visible, but all of my newer mail, from the time i went to office 2003
on, was plain missing!

nothing i did worked to fix it....but i kept the files just in case i
found the answer.

today, i read that i'm supposed to open the file, not import it, and
not replace the one that is created at outlook's first start up.

i opened the old folders, and everything appeared to be cool....except
in one of the folders, there is still 32 messages that are shown as
New/Unread, yet do not appear to actually be in that folder...there
are 32 messages visible, but all are old and read.

the other problem is that i still seem to be missing mail from
mid-2004 on.....i didn't use outlook much longer after these incidents
since i couldn't trust it to keep my mail, so i know that there
shouldn't be too much mail missing, but i didn't move to GMail till
the end of 2004, and even when i did, some of the mail was used in my
old Outlook.

does anyone have any ideas as to how to find this missing mail, if it
is in fact missing? its no longer on any of the old servers, so the
PST files are the only way to recover them.

thanx!