Hello all,
Well, as any of you who have followed my thread know, my FWH had an EA with an old girlfriend. I finally looked at the phone bill on-line yesterday and found that he had made many more calls to her than he had told me. He of course claims that he did not recall all these calls. He thought the pattern of the calls had been less frequent and spread out over more time--not so intense and long and obsessive. So now I have decided I want to read the e-mails that he dumped. I got to read about 2 days worth of them before he dumped them. Any help out there with getting them off his hard drive?

He has stopped all contact. I think his inability to fess up is blocking his progress with his own demons re why he did all this in the first place.

He would be the first one to tell you he has and had a great marriage. He knows I am far from perfect but he knows that I am pretty good--good looking for my age, improving my sense of self all the time, nicer to him now that the kids are less demanding, etc.he could not admit he He was having an EA even when he was in the EA.

Anyway, any help out there?
Lake

What kind of email address? Permanent one like AOL or Roadrunner? Or the web-based ones like Yahoo or Hotmail?

How does he access/read them? Does he use Outlook or something similar?

Does he use Microsoft Outlook for his email?

If he does I have a registry hack that is VERY good at recovering deleted emails.

Let me know.

Yes,
He does use microsoft outlook.

yes, he uses microsoft outlook. It is an e-mail address through his work place. it is a ".org" at a college.

Since I looked up the phone log and found he had down-played the phone calls, I told him I was going to attempt to obtain the e-mail correspondence that he dumped. I reminded him about Radical Honesty and told him that it would have been better if I had found out about the phone calls earlier so I could process it all at once--rather than being taken back to square one all the time.

I told him now was the time to be honest. He did give me some information about an e-mail he sent her after I thought he understood that I found his relationship with her to be a betrayal. I had not yet asked him to end the relationship however. The e-mail he sent her was very hurtful to me. I now question what else he said to her--how close did this come to a PA?? How do I know it wasn't a PA?

Close Microsoft Outlook.

This registry "hack" works in all version from Outlook 98 and up. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Start the registry editor (regedit.exe).

Go to the follwing key in the registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options

On the edit menu, click add value and the following registry value: Value name: DumpsterAlwaysOn Type: DWORD Set the data value to 1.

exit the registry editor.

This should allow you to recover deleted items that no longer reside in "deleted items"

Restart microsoft outlook.

To use the newly enable recovery feature: Go to the directory they were stored in: (inbox, etc...) Select the Tools menu. Select Recover Deleted items, a new dialog box will appear and recently deleted items for that folder will magically appear, If you want the buttons will give you the option to recover them. This will work in ALL folders.

Good Luck! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Thank you

Tread carefully, the things you read in an email may haunt you for the rest of your life. You really should be careful...maybe have someone else there with you to help you proof them?

Yes, that's a good idea. Once he knew I was going to do this, he told me what he think's to be the worst thing he said:

He brought her home for dinner after he met her in secret at a restaurant. He claimed to me he had "run into her" I figured things out a bit at that dinner. I let him know I felt betrayed. On Monday he e-mailed her saying in part "I either had to bring you home to meet my wife and family or get a room".

He says he said this to make light and make a joke and to also state bounderies he had established for himself regarding this relationship--(no sex means no foul, just fun but keep it secret from W).

He also says that in this e-mail, he was backing off from the relationship, planning on changing the tenor and reducing the correspondence. He claims the statement I just quoted was an effort to let her know he would have none of that in a light hearted joking way--he didn't want to make her feel bad.

It's hard for me to accept that someone as intelligent as my husband would see this kind of please don't throw me into the briar patch statement as letting her down gently from a relationship that they both say was purely platonic. I mean, even as I am writing this--it sounds crazy to me. But after he finally wrote the no contact letter and sent it, she wrote back saying 'gee, I thought we were just friends'

I have so many regrets in all this--regrets that I didn't see the hints he was giving me and question him during the EA, regrets that I allowed him to maintain privacy and e-mail her for one week in continued privacy after the big dinner . It allowed him to keep "playing" for that 'hotel' e-mail. I regret that I did not look at the phone log earlier to see the extent of phone contact early in the process. I regret that he did this when I thought we were pretty great. I mean, if you could see me, I look good--just like all of you do-- great figure, athletic, pretty, kids finally manageable so that there was less intensity on parenting and more joy in parenting... WHY??????

I don't know what they each thought as they were doing what they were doing but I know it came out of LEFT FIELD for me. I know I am rambling. I keep thinking I am better and then I regress. I should post this on my main thread but I'm here right now.
Lake

(((((Lake)))))

I went through a series of "rolling revelations". Yes, my FWH downplayed his involvement. First it was no, he had not had any ongoing contact with anyone (found to be wrong), that he never tried to contact anyone off the board (found to be wrong - he arranged for a "date" - I just discovered it before it happened), that he didn't know how to contact her (wrong - didn't confess that he knew her email address from her webpage until I confronted). And many things just didn't make sense to me until I finally cross-referenced her replies to his emails thereby discovering that on our anniversary he first accepted her invitation to a date. We were on a trip to an exotic location that I had planned to try to recapture our former closeness. I was terribly confused while on that trip that after our first night there, it was like we were on separate vacations. In retrospect it makes perfect sense. Contact with the OP makes the WS withdraw. There were three of us on the trip in a sense and I was the odd one out!

I did tons of research into my H's emails to try to put together the puzzle. I will never have all of it but I had enough to finally reach a tolerable level of discomfort.

My advice? Don't rely on the FWS's memory or truthfulness to give you what you seek. They will downplay their involvement for many reasons. They are feeling guilty and want to minimize the guilt. They know they have hurt you and they don't want to hurt you further and mistakenly believe the ostrich method (head in the sand until it all blows over) is the best way to get through this.

It is the rare and noble FWS that understands quickly that full disclosure is the path to healing. Our imaginations are so fertile that what we conjure up will often be far worse than the truth. But how do we know until we can verify what the FWS tells us.

And frankly their veracity is questionable to us. They have certainly lied by omission if not openly.

Keep pushing for full disclosure. Ask for what you need - email passwords, cell phone records, credit card statements, you name it.

But remember...you CAN get through this. It is hurting you now but you CAN get through this and you CAN recover.

Slight TJ for Walking the Field...will that registry hack work for Outlook Express also?

Walkingthefield,
H and I used your registry hack together. We were able to get deleted e-mails off of his computer. However, some of them were only on the work site main frame. So far, we have not been able to retreive those. Those are the ones he just looked at while he was connected to his work main frame but did not save to his computer. Also, it appears that some of them that I recall reading in a panic on D day from his computer did not show up today.

Only one painful thing came out of this: he did get up in the middle of the night to check his e-mail and e-mail back to her.

Otherwise, the messages were jr. high type stuff--very unmemorable and not really very purient. It was just the volume that really threw me for a loop on d-day. Also my H saying how much "fun" he was having with it.

Just hard to hear. But I have gotten aclimated to the fact that he did it--and is very remorseful and he is very glad to have NC.

Lesson for WSs: disclose, don't deny. the BS conjecture can be worse than the truth. Also--don't let things out in dribs and drabs over a course of weeks. This really has brought me back to square one a number of times. The roller coaster ride is rocky enough without weekly surprises of discovery.

I'd like to see the other e-mails just because of some issues he has described. And again as Eaglesoar said--even the FWS can't really be trusted with telling a decent version of reality.

Thank you for your help--hopefully I can now beat this demon--not let it eat me up and not let OW get to me---she is really not worth my energy.

Just hope FWH can keep up his efforts to help me heal and that I can keep up my efforts to show him the admiration he craves. No more LBs on my part I hope!!!

Lake

Ask him to request the computer help desk at work restore his mailbox from the time in question and put everything into an archive file. They don't need to know why. He can then send the archive file home and you can browse through it together.

Ahnold,
Thank you,
I will suggest this to him. He is very wary about this department knowing anything about this. But I will run it by him. I certainly don't want him to have any gossip at work. It would be different if he were still wayward but he is as far from wauward as he could be.
Lake