Iolo Search and Recover claims to recover email from Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird, though I haven't tried it myself. It's currently being given away free at Vnunet:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloads/2225774/iolo-search-recover

Try-Outlook Express recovery,able extracts and saves the user's messages from files with the dbx extension that Outlook Express uses to store folders, messages and news on the local disk,supports previewing the message bodies being recovered and stored in .dbx files (including corrupted dbx files),recovering dbx files in the batch mode (extracting messages from dbx files and immediately saving them to the disk),tool running under all Windows operating systems starting from Windows 98 (Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003).

Thanks Rosemarie, I tried it and it worked perfectly.

Carol, yes it recovers the attachments too,I just testet it to make sure.

Sorry for the late answer but tropical storm Hanna kept me a little busy.

Thank you both for the quick replies and thank you Rosemarie for suggesting Smart PC Tools, I'll try that. Does it recover attatchments as well?. I use Outlook Express as my email program.

Hi Carol,

if you have Outlook Express try this programm
http://smartpctools.com/email_recovery/index1.html

It is freeware and worked fine for me. :)

for what email program?

Hi All,

Could anyone recommend a good e-mail recovery program that is preferably free. I have found this one http://undelete-all.com/related/english/email/?gclid=CI2C__jyxJUCFQEq1AodmD_xig&hit=1&adurl=39 it can find deleted e-mails but to recover them, you have to upgrade to the Pro version at a cost of $65.95 although untill 05/09 it's $49.95

Thanks,
Carol.