Totally un-ubuntu question, but help appreciated

[koenn]

My Yahoo! Mail is setup as POP3 and Thunderbird receives them as POP3. I also have all the emails still on mail.yahoo.com

hm, yes, but i think leaving a copy on the server is optional

[Excedio]

Your absolutely right. I guess we wont know until the OP reports back to us.

[Malac]

Isn't Outlook Express a POP3 client - meaning that all the mail would be downloaded to the local system ?

koenn(et al) is correct unless they specifically ticked the "Leave a copy of messages on Server" option under Server settings in Accounts then their e-mails have been downloaded to the computer and deleted from the server.
This does depend on the e-mail server provider but they may have backups for their own use but I wouldn't count on it. You may try contacting them to see though. Doing this may have some privacy issues so even if they do they may not admit it.

Outlook Express stores e-mails in a very strange place on your hard drive in Windows, usually under /Documents and Settings/{USER_NAME}/Local Settings/Application Data/Identities/{SOME-SORT-OF-LONG-NUMBER-WITH-DASHES}/Microsoft/Outlook Express
This can be changed in Outlook Express but no-one ever does.

Address Book is usually under /Documents and Settings/{USER_NAME}/Application Data/Microsoft/Address Book

If you still have the original partition intact then I would search these directories from a live CD and if you can copy any and all files in these directories to a USB stick, CD-R or web backup service. Then boot into new system and find the same directories for the new version of {USER_NAME} and overwrite the files with the ones from original user directories.

Once up and running again you can write a small batch file that would copy the files from the weird Windows storage location to somewhere else outside the Windows file structure preferably a CD-R or different partition. Then run it, say, once a week or every couple of days depending on how many e-mails you are prepared to lose if this happens again.

Good Luck.
Hope this helps.

[clanky]

hm, yes, but i think leaving a copy on the server is optional

Normally it is, but it is usually not enabled by default.

[lordhaworth]

Cheers all,

Yeah, many lessons to be learnt (I back up). I have a few bits and pieces that I can still try, thanks for the ideas. I'll ge tback to you as to what comes out of it.

Thanks again