Nah sorry , the replies from you , except for this one, had extra stuff added to the email which made it kind of hard to read. Any bit of advice I offer has usually been done buy me at sometime or the other :) this reading the deleted was one of them, though I would try the other persons suggestion first. The easiest way to find the deleted one is by going to the search and typing *.dbx in it and make it search just C drive, I am not sure if show all files in explorers view settings has to be unticked or not to see the dbx's, but you will know if they dont show up from the search. Presuming the search went well, you should have a list of dbx files all looking familiar as they are named how they look in OE. right click the deleted one and go open with and tell it to use notepade, making sure that there is no tick in the box saying use this all the time. If you know what was in the email you lost, it will make you job of finding it in amongst the other stuff in the text file, when you find the email in question, copy and paste into another text editor or back into an email . Darryl ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brenda" > > im sorry but im not very technical here...i need step by step directions to > even get to this place.....plus i am totally exhausted To unsub or change your email settings: //www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk To access our Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/ //www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/