I was rearranging mail in AOL (I had >7,000 emails) and the program crashed multiple times. The filing cabinet was always buggy. It showed different numbers of emails in a folder depending on how you sorted the list (by date showed the most, by email address showed less than half). Finally that filing cabinet wouldn't work at all and the program wouldn't even open.
After reinstalling the latest version, saving a copy of the old filing cabinet and moving it out of the AOL folder, AOL would finally work. After much discussion, I was told by a AOL support techie and his supervisor that there was no way to recover that mail from a corrupted database and that I should have been making backups. Well I do backup regularly but I overlooked the email databases for AOL which are stored in users/shared/AOL/ not in a typical folder that one would backup (like your OWN user folder).
The AOL service assistant did it's thing and recovered all my email except one that contained some corrupted data. It even told me the title and sender of the email. I could tell it was non-essential.
HOORAY! AOL Service Assistant saved the day. I had to call AOL back and let them know about the software available on their own website and what it was capable of doing.