My deleted emails are disappearing. How do I stop this?

[Frogthis43]

Basically, what is happening is that anything I deleted prior to 5/22/07 is
still in the Deleted Items box (which is fine...I use it as a secondary place
to save emails for a while until I've decided to actually permanently delete
them). Everything after 5/22/07 is gone. If I get an email today and delete
it, it disappears immediately and completely...as tho it is skipping the
Deleted Items Box and just heads into computer neverneverland. What do I do?
The little box in maintenance which requests for deleted email to be deleted
permanently when you close your email is UNCHECKED and has been unchecked all
along. I recented went in on the advice of a friend and deleted a bunch of
temp files, but only temp files. After this happened, I had to reinstall
Messenger b/c it kept screwing up, and then I noticed this was going on. I'm
completely lost now at what I may have done to have redirected things I
delete into neverneverland instead of my deleted items file. HELP?!?!?!

 

[Frogthis43]

Okay, this is what I found out. I had a virus. A very nasty, mutating
horrible virus that was causing this to happen. It came in attached to a
yahoo news article that a friend sent me. After many days in the shop w/ a
computer guru, I have gotten the computer back, but w/ a cleaned email. No
old email was able to remain b/c the virus attacked it all. Thought someone
might care the reason why all this happened.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Okay, this is what I found out. I had a virus. A very nasty,
mutating horrible virus that was causing this to happen. It came in
attached to a yahoo news article that a friend sent me. After many
days in the shop w/ a computer guru, I have gotten the computer back,
but w/ a cleaned email. No old email was able to remain b/c the
virus attacked it all.

I find I'm skeptical of this claim. If you computer guru told you this, I'd
be more inclined to think he said this only because he couldn't figure out
what the real cause was. I'll admit it may be possible, but since there
aren't tons of other reports similar to yours, I remain doubtful.