Accidentally deleted emails are tough to recover – email systems generally have a few safeguards in place, but once you delete your trashcan, that’s it – your messages are gone.
If you’ve only just deleted an email, it’s probably still in your trashcan or deleted folder – check for it before you move on to the next step.
If you’re still reading, then let’s assume you’ve checked your deleted emails folder (seriously, do it, even if you think there’s no hope, it’s always possible it’s in there) and what you needed wasn’t there.
What happens next depends greatly on what email program you use. If you use Outlook, you’re in luck. There are a variety of programs designed specifically to recover emails from Outlook.
Here are three options with their pros and cons:
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R-Mail: This software is designed to do two things - recover lost emails and rebuild damaged email files. It does them well, but at $115 it’s pricey. If you have Outlook Express, however, you can get a version for just $30. If you suspect you have difficult to recover or damaged files, this is your best option, as free options don’t usually come with sophisticated rebuilding capabilities.
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Stellar Phoenix: This program is free and allows you to scan for emails that might still be hidden on your hard drive and then you can pick and choose which ones to restore.
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OutlookFIX: With a very simple interface, OutlookFIX scans and recovers all the files it can find related to your Outlook account including emails, contacts, and calendar items.
IIf you use a web-based program like Gmail,
Hotmail or Yahoo! it’s not so easy and might even be impossible, but you
should still give it a shot.
With Yahoo! you can request to have your email restored to a specified
date and time in the past, but you’ll have to make sure that you
download or forward every email currently in your account that you want
to keep. You risk missing another important email if something new comes
in and you don’t see it to forward or download it before Yahoo! restores
your account.
Other web-based programs don’t have this option that Yahoo! gives you.
For the most part, you just need to be very careful not to delete emails
if you prefer web-based email. If something is very important, download
it or back up the information in another way.
Email is one of the easiest things to accidentally delete, how many
times have you accidentally check off an important email when clearing
about a bunch of unimportant ones? It’s fixable if you catch it
immediately and fish it out of your trashcan. But if you don’t realize
it you’re out of luck.
Email is one of the toughest files to recover. We often don’t store
files locally and they’re usually small files so it doesn’t take much to
overwrite them completely after deletion.
The key to email recovery is never to lose your emails in the first
place, so back up all your emails. Seriously. Back them up.