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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 30 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.
There's a Microsoft Fix it file you can download to
make this Registry edit for you, available on this page:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/246153
You'll need to make this Registry edit on every PC from which you want to access
the hidden dumpster.
You can also access the Dumpster for all your email
folders from within Outlook Web Access.
As described above, on the Options page of OWA there is a
button to view and recover emails in the Dumpster for the Deleted Items
folder. To access the Dumpster for other folders, you need to manually enter a
specific URL in the Address Bar of your browser.
This URL is in the format:-
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You may find it easier typing these URLs in OWA than editing the Registry to
access the hidden Dumpsters.
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 me 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
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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