missing email from before 2010

i've recently upgraded to outlook.com (2-3 months ago) and everything seemed fine then. after talking with my wife, i wanted to pull up an email she had sent me back in 2003 because i've saved every email i have received from her since we met and i've been a user of hotmail for years before that with no problems. so just now i find that there are no messages in my inbox prior to 7/26/2010. after searching high and low for an answer I keep finding the same response, we can recover 5 days of deleted items/your account was inactive/your account was hacked. these are not good answers, they are answers designed to brush people off. you see, this is a real problem for me. not only because it makes me lose faith in a product and company i've been a happy consumer of until this point, but because it has real and palpable impact on my life. now that i am trying to go back and reconstruct a great moment, from emails that i would never delete or damage, they are not there. it's a very hard line that has been cut. all emails from before a particular date. this tells me it is a technical problem. how can i have my email from prior to 7/26/2010 restored or has microsoft deleted them all for me more than 5 days ago without warning me?