Sometimes you deliberately delete an email, which you should have left behind afterwards. And sometimes you accidentally press a crazy key combination and you see emails disappear from your mailbox. Are they gone forever? This is how you retrieve deleted emails in Gmail and Outlook.
There can be many reasons why emails disappear. Sometimes you have deleted something yourself (on purpose, but also by accident), sometimes you share a mailbox with someone who has deleted something. However, it can often also be a technical error or a button combination that does not work properly, so that you suddenly see messages disappear from your inbox.
Hopefully you’ll be there in time, because the longer you wait, the more likely the email can’t be recovered. Ominous words, but especially after 30 days it becomes a difficult issue.
Back to the beginning. You just found out that an email has gone missing, and often it happens either because you need something important and can’t find it, or because a colleague or friend says they never got a reply. Then where can you search?
Deleted items
Both Gmail and Outlook have a trash folder. Within Outlook this is called Deleted itemswhile Gmail for the name Garbage can has chosen. This is the first place to look if you’ve lost an email, because it’s really the virtual trash can of your mailbox. Emails often remain in this folder for 30 days before they are actually deleted.
If the e-mail has been deleted recently, there is a good chance that you will find it there. You’ll find this Deleted Items folder to the left of the folders. You can restore the mail by dragging it to the inbox (also known as Inbox).
(If you don’t see the Trash option in Gmail? First click on the in the menu on the left More-knob.)
Recovery Tool
What if you deleted the email more than 30 days ago? This makes the process more complicated. Some mail that is already this far, it is still recoverable. However, you have to put in more effort for this.
Within Gmail there is a way to see if the message can still be retrieved, the Gmail Message Recovery Tool. In principle, this trick is really only intended for emails that have been lost due to server problems or other causes on Google’s side, but you can always try to recover it this way.
Recoverable Items
The counterpart of Gmail’s Recovery Tool is the Recoverable Items from Outlook. This folder is not visible, but you can find it. Go to your folder for this Deleted items. Then you will see the option Recover deleted items from server.
Click on that and you can find a list of the e-mails that you can retrieve. Select the email you wish to recover from this. Don’t see the option to recover deleted items at all? Then your Outlook unfortunately does not have that option.
Archive
What often happens when you accidentally press a wrong key is that you archive an email. The advantage is that he is not gone, but you have to get him back yourself. Like the Deleted Items folder, the Outlook archive folder is on the left. On Gmail, archiving is a bit more complex, but you should see when you choose All mail also the archived emails and you can drag them to your Inbox to recover them.
Besides these solutions, there is really no way to retrieve a deleted email. You could look in other folders (for example also the Spam box or the drafts) or use the search engine of your inbox, but often the credo applies: if an email is not in deleted items or the archive, then you should delete it as lost. consider. It is hoped that reversing your mailbox is fruitful, but don’t assume.
If it is an email that has been sent to several people, you can ask them to forward the email, but otherwise you will have to go back to the sender and ask them to resend the original email.
Many more Outlook tips can be found in this online course Working with Outlook.
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