The only way to recover lost emails resulting when compacting email in OUTLOOK EXPRESS is to have a backup of your email files. Most people don't do that, or even know how, so most likely you're out of luck if you have to ask me "how do I do that?" If you knew how to make backups of your email files, then you would know where they are ... so....
To stop this from happening in the future, that's even easier. Stop leaving your important historical emails in the INBOX. Compacting causes ALL the data in the default email folders to be possibly deleted. So, make some storage folders in Outlook Express and organize your emails as they come in. Folders like:
- Family
- Humor
- Purchases
- Pictures
- etc...
Compacting does NOT touch emails in folders you created.