I thought I understood Microsoft Windows Live but it seems I really don't!!!  I currently use Windows Live Mail to see a number of my email accounts, such as Yahoo and Vodafone.  I had thought that when I hit send/receive, the email that I saw in Windows Live Mail was downloaded to my PC but it seems that this is not the case.  I recently had a problem with PlusNet (who took over Vodafone at Home some years back) and without my permission they deleted all 4 of my Vodafone email addresses (1 primary and 3 secondary accounts).  I said I wasn't happy about this as all these emails were still currently in use but they said they could only resurrect the primary account.  After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I had no choice but to accept that I was never going to get my secondary emails back.  I didn't think it would be a major problem as I had all the historical emails on my PC (or so I thought) so I just needed to write to people to let them know that these email addresses no longer worked.  Unfortunately when I removed the email accounts from Windows Live Mail (because I didn't want to keep getting the error messages coming up after I had hit send/receive), it also removed all the historical emails that I thought were stored on my PC, hence my confusion!!

What I am looking to understand is, if the email was never on my PC, where was it?  Was I only ever seeing a version of what was stored on the Vodafone server or is there still some chance I could locate the historical emails within Microsoft somewhere?

I really hope my explanation makes sense to someone as I would really like to understand how this product works as it's probably not really giving me what I thought it was!