I use Windows Live Mail 12 (WLM).  Over the years I have collected eight different email accounts for personal and business use all of which are still used either regularly or occasionally.  The email database is kept in the “My Documents” file for ease of back up.  Over the years I have had various problems and as a result the folder system in my email folder is different from that reported by Live Mail. 

For instance, for my “Pipex” email account, I can see two folders in Windows Explorer “Pipex” and “Pipex 1”. Each folder contains an “Inbox” and each “Inbox” contains a number of *.eml files.  When viewed in WLM I see one Pipex account with one inbox which contains ALL the inbox entries in both Pipex and Pipex 1 folders. 

In my “Storage Folder” which is 11GBytes and contains 92,000 files there is a “Recovered items” folder which is 3.5GBytes and contains 27,000 files and 200 folders!  This does not show up in the Storage Folders section in WLM

There are other problems which I won’t go into unless they turn out relevant as I think they all stem from my email database being corrupted.

My question is how can I recover from this and rebuild the integrity of my email database. 

I have tried:

1 Uninstalling and reinstalling WLM – no effect

2. Compacting the database – it comes up with an error message ”The folder is currently in use by WLM or by another application” (It does this even if I close all programmes I can including Zone Alarm, Microsoft Security Essentials etc before trying to compact the database)

3. Changing the location using Options/Mail/Advanced/Maintenance/Store Folder and then compacting – same error message about file being in use.

I have tried looking in Microsoft’s support but there seems to be nothing of any use there.

Any help would be gratefully received.

Gerard