Very much hoping someone can help. And please bear in mind that I am not at all technical.

I use hotmail on my macbook pro through outlook care of microsoft office for mac 2011.

I was having problems with search functionality in outlook and, following advice on a forum I found, I deleted com.microsoft.outlook files from preferences in library.

I restarted my machine. Outlook was totally empty. I closed it down again and saw that outlook was in my trash. I dragged it back in to applications.

Then restarted and everything was gone.

I have a very important court case coming up and all my evidence is on email.

I am absolutely distraught about what has happened and desperately hope that there is some way of retrieving the information.

To make matters worse, my external hard drive (with time machine on it) has packed up. I'm sending it to Seagate to try and recover data but there's no guarantee that they will be able to get anything.

Thank you very much in advance for your help
Jessica