all gone by accident

gulp.. after the elation of getting Gmail this morning, I’ve hit the dismal valley of despair, b/c I hit the wrong button and a big portion of my home email is now deleted permanently. Yes, I said yes to Outlook Express’ prompt to whether I wanted to delete permanently. I think what happened was that a few days ago, I click-and-dragged my main Inbox folder into the Deleted Items folder, and I noticed this strange anomaly that when I would delete single emails (using the X in my toolbar, or the delete key) it’d prompt me whether I wanted to delete the email permanently. Strange, my cursor is just on one email, why would it prompt me? It didn’t used to — it used to just delete and go to the next email. I checked my options, didn’t see any that said to “confirm email deletion”. Then I saw a good number of items in my Deleted Items, many of them being spam, and I thought it’s time to clean out the trash.. I hit Yes, and it was all gone. And so was my Inbox. Oh my. Gone. A download of 2 or 3 email recovery programs turned up nothing. Nothing. Inadvertent housecleaning. And, no, I still have not learned-my-lesson, and I still will not backup.