Cleanup advised that I hadn’t used Windows Live Essentials in seven months so I took its suggestion and removed it. I didn’t realize that it was going to kill Windows Live Mail which I used every day. Contacts and all mail is gone. How do I get it back?
Any backups or restore points?
Unfortunately not
Contacts and mail should still be in your web mail "Gmail - Outlook etc, only your local (system) email should be affected.
Windows Live Mail isn’t on-line.
Google about this and there is plenty of information about restoring Windows Live Mail.
Although it still works with pre-Win10 OS MS have not supported it since 2017 and no longer provide a Windows Live Essentials or or separate Windows Live Mail downloads since then.
There are some apparently OK sources for it but reports of plenty of dodgy ones too. I found a Live Essentials installer on the internet archive site Wayback Machine which was linked too direct from a MS Community forum post. Whether it is safe or even works I have no idea. On your own head whatever you do.
Better to use a more up to date e-mail client now, Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird being the most obvious ones to try.
Good luck on restoring something that’s been totally deleted.
Without a backup to go back too, anything recovered will be spotty at best.
One of the reasons for using an online service for your emails is the fact that if something happens to your system, you haven’t lost the information.
I realise that, it still pulls email from a web client though…that’s how it used to be set up on my system years ago.
If I deleted Windows Live Essentials from the system everything was still on outlook.com - live.com.
The OP could also have tried Recuva because things are rarely unintentionally “totally” deleted. If it was uninstalled using Windows Add/Remove Programs then there could be enough left to recover it.
One solution I found for recovering WLM accounts was to try this:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qexi-HBjDk0&app=desktop
Now if it really has been “totally” deleted then this is not going to work but with Recuva and/or Windows own less than thorough uninstall system you may be lucky. Just thought it worth trying.
I expected some tough love and got it. I just figured there was an easy fix since it was so easy to remove-no double prompts to warn of permanent deletion as with Data Shredder. Anyway after digging around some I located my data. Very little of it was in webmail so that’s a very good thing. Live Mail should restore if I can only find it. Seems easier than trying to port Live Mail data into webmail.