Recover Deleted Email

You know that feeling when you’ve highlighted a number of emails and held down the shift key and tapped the delete key to permanently delete them all and then you spy an email in the group (just before they disappear) that you didn’t want to delete! Yes, I’m sure we’ve all done that. This article will show you how to recover deleted emails – from outlook.com in the cloud and your desktop Outlook.

To Delete or Permanently Delete

We’re all familiar with the delete key and we use it multiple times a day. However, perhaps some don’t know there’s a way to bypass putting email in your Deleted Items Folder and permanently getting rid of them.

To permanently delete, simply hold down the shift key and then press the delete key. You’ll get a warning that it’ll be permanently gone and you confirm.

I like using it because it saves a step – if it’s already gone, I don’t have to go and empty it from my deleted items.

 

Recovering Permanently Deleted Items

Last week, I was cleaning out an email account I use for signing up for things that I know I’ll probably never read, but there’s something cool being offered. You’ve done this – right!

Then I realized – too late – that I deleted a group of items I wanted to save to go through to find a discount code! Yikes! I had always heard that deleted items could be recovered, but probably not permanently deleted items. So I did a quick search on it and found this article from Microsoft on how to recover deleted items.

The article said, “you can recover those items if they’re still in your Deleted Items folder, and in some cases, you can even recover items after the Deleted Items folder is emptied.”

It didn’t say anything about recovering permanently deleted items, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

Steps To Recover Permanently Deleted Items

The steps are the same from the web outlook.com as well as Desktop Outlook 2013/2016:

1. Click on your Deleted Items folder.
2. From Desktop Outlook, look at the top left for ‘recover deleted items from server’.
3. From the web, look for the bar at the top that says, Recover Deleted Items.
4. On the desktop, you’ll be presented with a pop-up window with a large number of deleted items. Select the ones you want and they will be restored back to the in-box.
5. On the web, a new window will open (you may have to enable pop-ups). You’ll see a list of emails with empty check boxes. Check the ones you want to recover and they’ll be put back in the in-box.
6. That’s all there is to it! Yes – I did find the email I needed – yay!

   

 

Summary

The article from Outlook.com that I linked to above did have a couple notes at the bottom. You have 30 days to recover items from your deleted folder and just 14 days to check on things in your Junk Folder until they are deleted. If you have and monitor an account for your child, any email you delete from there can not be recovered.

If you need to restore permanently deleted emails, I hope this will be as easy for you to do as it was for me. Since Outlook.com has become more business and ‘Exchange’ mail-like, maybe that’s why I didn’t have any problems.