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How to Recover Deleted Emails in Outlook
When you delete an email in Outlook it goes to the Deleted Items
folder.
Like the Recycle Bin on the Desktop, this gives you a second
chance if you delete an email by accident.
Where do emails go when you delete them out of the Deleted Items
folder?
If Outlook is using an account on an Exchange server, the
answer is the Dumpster - the American word for a skip.
This is the place Exchange stores deleted emails for a length of time,
called the Retention Period, the length of which can set by an
administrator, before finally and
permanently deleting them.
The Arrowmail Exchange servers have a
Retention Period of 14 days.
The Dumpster
The good news is that you can access the Dumpster
yourself from within Outlook.
Here's how:-
Select the Deleted Items
folder then click:-
Tools - Recover Deleted Items…
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The Hidden Dumpster
This is fine for emails that have passed through the Deleted Items
folder, but it's possible to "hard delete" items straight to the
Dumpster from any folder by holding down the Shift key while deleting an
email.
With Outlook open and an email selected in the Inbox, you're 4
key-presses away from disaster:-
Ctrl+a then Shift+Del
This means "Select all emails in the Inbox" then "move them all to
the hidden dumpster".
I've lost count of the number of support calls I've had where this
has happened.
Emails hard deleted from any folder go to the Dumpster but, by default,
you can only retrieve ones that have passed through the Deleted Items
folder.
To be able to access the entire Dumpster you need to make a Registry change.
(Remember that care should always be taken when editing the Registry as there
are settings in there that can render your Windows installation
inoperable.)
Click: Start - Run and type regedit then
click OK to open the Registry Editor.
Navigate to:-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options
Click: Edit - New - DWORD Value
Rename the new value:
DumpsterAlwaysOn
Double-click this new value and set its value
to 1:-
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Close Regedit
Close Outlook, if it's open, restart it and the
Recover Deleted Items… option will now be enabled for every folder, including
those that contain Contacts, Calendar items, etc.
You'll need
to make this Registry edit on every PC from which you want to access the
hidden dumpster. There's no way to access the hidden part of
the Dumpster from Outlook Web Access.
Recovering Deleted Emails from the Cache on another PC
If some major catastrophe has happened with your email, and missing
items are not recoverable from any part of the Dumpster, there may still
be some things you can do.
If you've been using Outlook with Exchange, in cached mode, on
another PC, which is currently turned off, this PC will have a full copy
of your Outlook data in a local OST file.
This data will be as up-to-date as the last time you used Outlook on
that PC, hopefully before the current problem occurred.
The last thing you want to happen is for this PC synchronise with
Exchange and so delete the items you're after from its cache so, before
you turn this PC on or open Outlook, make sure that it's NOT
connected to the Internet.
Maybe pull out the network cable
or turn off the wireless card.
When you open Outlook on this PC, while it's off-line, you should see
all the missing items still there. The first task is to copy them to a
local PST file:-
From within Outlook, click:-
File - New - Outlook Data File…
Select Outlook Office Personal Folders File then click OK
Click OK then OK to accept the default location and
name of the new PST file.
You'll now see a new set of folders in Outlook called Personal Folders.
Drag-and-drop all the items you need from the mail folders, contacts,
calendar etc. in the Exchange folders to the equivalent place in
Personal Folders.
When the copying process has completed you can safely re-enable your Internet
connection and allow Outlook to synchronise with Exchange.
The next thing to do is to copy the items you've saved to Personal
Folders, back into your Exchange folders, as the synchronisation process
will have just deleted them from there.
Exchange will accept these as valid new items and will copy them
back, first to your mailbox on the server, and then to the local caches
on all the other computers where you use Outlook.
When you're sure that this has worked, right-click on Personal
Folders and select
Close "Personal Folders".
The local cache of your Exchange data, held on a PC, is your insurance
against a failure of the Exchange server that could be
unrecoverable.
Maybe the building housing the server and the backup
tapes has burnt down.
You could then arrange to have your incoming emails diverted to a
POP3 mailbox and access a SMTP server so that your email is functional
again.
I've seen someone working this way, more than 2 years after the
Exchange server they were using disappeared.
Archiving Email
This is where a separate copy of all incoming and/or outgoing emails
are stored on the
mail-server in a read-only folder, separate from your mail mailbox
which you can access and search through when the original of an email is
nowhere to be found.
If this is the only reason you have for keeping a mail archive then
it's not too hard, or expensive, to organise such a system for keeping the
last 30 days' emails.
Arrowmail offers such a "rolling archive" service
here.
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