Lost+emails+due+to+changing+server+etc.

Lost emails due to changing server etc.

Click on Start and choose Find (or it might say Search).

Next, choose Files or Folders.

Patience will be a virtue here. Unless you remember the exact name of your document, you’re going to have to employ a few ways of describing your document. Let us start by assuming you are looking for a Word document. First, check the Look in field to make sure it’s set to search the entire hard drive (C:), just like above. If it’s set for the A: drive (floppy) or Documents, for example, your computer will only look in those places and you’ve already looked there, so it would just be wasting your time. In the Named field, you really don’t have to have the exact name of your document. For example, you could call this document “Wherefore Art Thou,” so let us look for anything with “Wherefore” in the title. But, and this next part is important, since you are not searching for an exact title, you want the computer to find anything that has that word in the name. This is critical when you’re looking for a document with a name you are unsure of. You do this by adding *.* at the end of your search term. This tells the computer to search for anything that has this word anywhere in the document name.

Type in the Named field whatever *.*. click Find Now.

Now, it’s time to find a lost e-mail. Let us say you were looking for an old Infinet e-mail (which had the extension of “infi.net” from your friend Sam). This time we have chosen E-mail File from the drop down list:

You have also gone back to the Name and Location tab and entered “Sam” into the Containing Text field, because more than likely, the e-mail is probably not named “Sam,” but it will have his name in it.

Sadly you got nothing! You will need to keep expanding your search until you start getting some hits. They are there, Mail files, including the Sent ones, the Trash ones Whenyou double click on one of those, it will ask you which program you want to use to open them. There are a ton of e-mails stacked in there, it turns out, so chose to use WordPad or Word. Please keep in mind that this can be a time consuming process, especially if you have a lot of files, etc. on your PC and have been using it for years. But, all in all, the files are there. If you still haven’t found “Sam” at this point, you can wait until the e-mails are all converted to a Word or text file and search the document with Ctrl + F. One final note: With all the stuff you’ve found in your search, it might also have occurred to you that there are some files you really want, but are gone. If you find a file of old e-mails or other items you want to be truly gone, you will need to ensure that it gets overwritten multiple times  