I occasionally receive a message in OE which will not allow me to open advising the message is not associated with a file and instructs to go to Folder Options in Control Panel. Can anyone give me a tip on how to proceed.

Ed

Who can I ask how to get my data back from my old outlook express Email

who can I ask how to get my data back from my old outlook express Email
Once you send an email, you can't get it back. The email and any data that was attached is out there and there's nothing to be done.

Sorry, I hope the data wasn't too incriminating.

How do we recover the outlook Express data or email during compacting

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.