I've been going through this for 6+ hours now. What it appears happened was the local mail file had become corrupt and what's even worse is it looks like my backup copy was also corrupt. For a week or so the "Mail waiting to be sent" folder was empty but the old mail and sent mail was fine. So I followed the instructions to "Restore" the mail file (which is a bit over 1 gig...). The restore ran for about 45 seconds and popped up a error message and all three folders disappeared. I restarted AOL and get a "File cannot be opened. AOL will attempt to restore the file." but it doesn't do anything and the "Mail on my PC" folder group was grayed out. So I renamed the file from my screen name to my screen name .old and AOL started up but of course the folders were empty.

I purchased the ePreserver program for $25 and ran it only to have it tell me the file was corrupt and I need to buy ePreserver Recovery (for $150....ugh). So I went back to their site and downloaded the demo of the recovery program just to see if it would work and it gave a bunch of error messages then said it found 35 email, which is no where close to the 1000+ I had in there. Maybe the software will work for you guys but it seems my mail file is too far gone. I've requested a refund from the company since the software is of no use to me, hopefully they will return the $25 without a huge hassle.

So for future reference c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\c_americaonline_xx\organize\YourScreenName is the file with your offline mail.....make a backup if you haven't recently. Or just backup the entire folder and copy it back when there is a problem or your moving computers. Or even better stop using AOL.

-Allan

the problem is that AOL integrates with Outlook and does not throw the switch to leave the messages on the server. The messages are downloaded to Outlook and removed from AOL. The real question is how do you put them back in AOL from Outlook?