So, there have been some other threads about my travails with my email system.

I'm in the process of finally, I thought, getting to a point I could live with it.

To refresh, a new W7Pro installation, a new WLM12 installation, and an import project from a couple of different sources.  I successfully transferred the most important files, and redid subfolders such that I could find stuff, new and old, again.

But today, things were getting worse than it has been in the few days prior, which is to say that WLM "not responding" happens more and more, and, today, after a restart (which seems to work for a while, usually), my ENTIRE tree was empty.  That is, all my accounts (there are 4 that I have, two of which are not checked any more) had nothing in any of the folders, and my outbox location had moved back to the bottom of all those, when I'd not long ago moved it to between my primary account and the 'quick views' - which ALSO had nothing showing other than what emails had just come in on the reload's automatic checking.

Not panicking yet, I went to the storage folder.  Ha!  It's all there (or seems to be).  Except, for example, my drafts, which have stuff going back nearly 20 years, now has no date older than a month ago, with the vast bulk being 10 days ago's date.

Well, that's a nuisance, but liveable.  So, I go about (again!!!) importing all that; I presume that I will then laboriously have to move all of those folders and sub folders from some storage file back up to where I can actually conveniently access them.

But wait!  The drafts folder, all 901 entries, has now been emptied.  I have no idea, as it's still in the laborious process of moving all 36GB back into the folder or whatever it's called that will allow me to see them in my WLM when I open it (rather than seeing some encoding which has no relationship - and now, not even a date - with what I can look for), whether that's a display anomaly, or that importing them (which I presume will show those in some other folder name when I again examine the WLM store folder) actually takes them  out of the source folder, or if the problem somehow is with my W7Pro file manager.

This is beyond distressing, as my very extensive and time-consuming reconstruction of my email information just went belly up.

Would a restore to an earlier date cure that issue (that is, give me my email folders as I had it earlier this morning), without losing the work I've done in the meantime?

I'm very nervous, as my email is basically my life's story, and all of my various charitable projects, and the rest of it, and this is just the icing on the cake of the various other issues which have shown up in these forums.

So, to summarize:

WLM has been locking up frequently.  A restart usually makes it work again for a while. There is, most of the time, some time spent 'restoring the database' or some such similar message before it actually opens again.

The last time I did that, ALL of my current folders were empty.  All of the accounts I had, all of the laboriously reconstructed prior files in the storage folder, message rules and the like, all were gone.

Inspection of the Message Store file (via windows explorer or whatever means lets me open a folder directly) showed that under a different name, all of the missing folders were present, albeit with mangled dates in some cases.

Importing all of those is currently under way (at 36 or so GB, it will take a long time), but in at least one case, drafts, that folder (in the message store folder) is empty. That is, it's as though someone highlighted all and pushed the delete button.  The file exists, right where it was before, but now all 901 items are gone.

I have no idea what's causing all this.  I have a new PS, MOBO, quad-core brain, 1T new 7200RPM drive, and NO other programs that I use give me any grief.  WLM seems to give me endless grief.

So, would restoration (assuming some of my many restarts actually set a restore point) to earlier today put it all back together?

and

Without having to be an Outlook or some other web-based Microsoft client, is there some other email client which can replace WLM12?  I've been using essentially the same thing since OE, which is why I have drafts (where I keep stuff I want to refer to often) all the way back to 1995 (or, at least, I used to have them...).

Oy.