Lost Emails

Hello!

My friend has "lost" all his emails from within Outlook Express. There is absolutely no sign of them.

All was well until he copied text from a web page & then pasted it into an email. After sending the email, he closed his computer down. When he restarted his computer he wanted to refer to a previous email only to find that all were gone.

He seems to think that there was a virus, possibly a Visual Basic related one, in the text that he cut from the web page & then copied into the email.

Is this possible & is there any way to retrieve the emails?

If it is possible to pick up a virus this way, are there any precautions than he & others can take to prevent this from happening in the future?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me with this matter.

 

tim,
let's keep this in one place
http://forums.techguy.org/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=17

less confusing