A friend recently called me in to help him resolve an ongoing problem with the folder structures in Windows Live Mail. I first looked at this a few weeks ago when he thought he’d lost all messages and we discovered them in the Storage Folders\Recovered Items folder. Why, puzzles us, but he was happy to leave them there.

Today there are, additionally, Storage Folders (1) and Storage Folders (2) and within these there are multiple levels of Recovered Items and Storage Folders, see this photo of C:\Users\Mick\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail:

One of the Inboxes is receiving new messages but old messages are duplicated all over the structure, many are readable, some get an error like: “The file [...] could not be opened because it does not exist or is being used by another application. (0x800C013E)”

How do we get out of this mess, and how do we prevent it reoccurring? 

N.B. It is a POP3 email account and, although there are folders named POP3.ukonline.., he moved on from ukonline a couple of years ago to zen.co.uk.

Many thanks.