Viewing old confirmation emails

I've been reviewing some of the older threads that cover this issue and I'm still a bit lost as far as whether or not there's a way to view past confirmation emails generated by a successful transaction.

In one thread, it mentioned using phpMyAdmin and I went out there to look, but the only table that I saw that looked like it might be of help (email_archive) was empty.

Bottom line: I need to see past confirmation emails that has the middle 8 numbers of the credit card displayed. Is there a way to do that?

The emails with the middle credit card numbers ARE NEVER ARCHIVED. That's for security reasons. That information IS NEVER TO BE STORED.
You cannot retrieve that information from your store. You'll have to look at the actual emails that were sent to you.
Or, better yet, use a real live payment gateway service that processes the cards in real-time, so that you never have this problem.