Approaches to Recover Deleted Items or Email in Outlook Web App

By | February 28, 2018
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Modern time communication is impossible without emails. Every day, we send and receive a number of emails. To keep our Outlook mailbox clean, we often delete unnecessary emails. While deleting emails, sometimes we accidentally delete some of the important emails. Deleting an important email or any other item can cause serious trouble to Outlook Web App users. In such situation, it becomes necessary to recover deleted items or email in Outlook Web App. This write-up will discuss how to restore deleted Outlook emails or other items. This discussion will help users to retrieve their accidentally deleted Outlook Web App items.

How to Recover Deleted Outlook Items or Emails Manually

There are many methods to recover deleted emails or other items from Outlook Web App. The methods actually vary based on the location of your deleted items. Here, we will discuss manual techniques to restore Outlook Web App deleted items.

  • Recover Items from Deleted Items Folder

  1. Sign in to your Outlook Web App account.

  2. Click on Deleted Items folder from your mailbox folder list.

  3. Find out the email message you want to restore. Right-click the message and then click on Move>> Inbox options.

  4. In case of recovering other Outlook items, follow the instruction:

  • For Contact, right-click to select Move>> Contacts.

  • To retrieve a Calendar item, right-click and select Move>> Calendar.

  • For Task, right-click and select Move>> Task.

Additional Information on Item Recovery from Deleted Items Folder

  • A deleted folder will appear as a subfolder in Deleted Items folder. To recover the folder and the items within it, right-click the folder and then select Move. Now, select a folder where it will be moved.

  • To find out items easily in Deleted Items folder, sort the folder by Type. Thus, the similar type of items will be grouped together.

  • Every Outlook Web App has a policy set by the admin. According to it, items of Deleted Items folder get moved to Recoverable Items folder after a certain time. If your deleted items are absent in Deleted Items folder, search the Recoverable Items folder instead.

Recover Items from Recoverable Items Folder

Deleted items can also be found in Recoverable Items folder. The items go to this hidden folder in below situations:

  • If any item from Deleted Items folder is deleted.

  • If Deleted Items folder gets emptied.

  • If an item is hard deleted by pressing Shift+Delete.

Execute these steps to retrieve items from Recoverable Items folder.

  1. Sign in to Outlook Web App.

  2. Find out Deleted Items folder from the folder list. Right-click on it and then click recover deleted items option.

  1. You can also use the search box to find out the item you need to retrieve.

  2. Once you find that item, click Recover.

Users can recover emails, contacts, calendar, and tasks from this folder, After recovery, these items will move to following folders.

  • Email messages>> Inbox folder.

  • Calendar entries>> Calendar folder.

  • Contacts>> Contacts folder.

  • Tasks>> Tasks folder.

Additional Information on Recovering items from Recoverable Items Folder

  • To restore deleted items in Outlook.com, users have to use other methods.

  • The deletion date for a Recoverable Items folder item indicated the date it was deleted and moved to Deleted Items folder. It does not specify the date when it was hard deleted and moved to Recoverable Items folder.

  • Here are some tips to find out items from Recoverable Items folder. These will be helpful when you have a lot of items in Recoverable Items folder.

  • While looking for a contact, search the name of the person as contacts do not have a subject field.

  • If you are searching for a calendar appointment, look out for an item with no subject line or person’s name.

  • While looking for a calendar entry, task, or contact, Search for “No preview is available” text.

  • To retrieve multiple deleted items, tick the checkbox beside every item and click Restore. The checkboxes will remain invisible until you hover over them.

Multiple adjacent items can also be selected by clicking the first item check box, and then ticking the last item checkbox while holding down the Shift key.

  • In order to purge items from Recover deleted items window, select the item and click Purge. Remember that once you have purged an item, you cannot retrieve it back using Recover Deleted Items tool. You have to ask your Outlook Admin if they can restore a purged item.

  • For every organization, Admin determines the policy of removing items from Recoverable Items folder. It can be either 14 days or 30 days, depending on the policy chosen by your organization. Admin might retrieve items even after 14 days. If any deleted item in unavailable in Recoverable Items folder, ask your admin to recover it if possible.

Limitations of Recovering Deleted Items or Email in Outlook Web App Manually

There are some limitations of these manual methods of retrieving deleted items. Some of the limitations are mentioned here.

  • Emails deleted more than 30 days earlier are impossible to restore.

  • All recovered email go to Inbox, not to their corresponding folders.

  • Purged emails from the Recoverable Items folder are irretrievable.

  • Users need to be tech-savvy to execute these methods properly.

  • The manual processes to recover deleted items are time taking.

Why You Must Take Regular Gmail Backup

  • To avoid permanent loss of Gmail data you should backup Gmail Account

  • For storing data locally to prevent hacking

  • A precaution for Google outages

  • To maintain server storage limit

Conclusion

Accidental Outlook email or item deletion is not an uncommon situation. Here we have discussed how to recover deleted items or emails in Outlook Web App. Using these methods, users can restore their deleted emails and other Outlook items. But these methods have some drawbacks of their own. Considering these, it is better to backup your Outlook Web App data. Outlook data backup can save users from any unwanted situation caused by accidental deletion.

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James smith

He is a data recovery expert who works as freelancer technical blogger. He has been in the Data recovery industry for 10+years and specialized in data recovery solutions & data management techniques. He researched on various email client issues & now willing to share information among people through the Web.