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Office 365 Email - How do I recover messages or items in Outlook Web App?

Question:
Office 365 Email - How do I recover messages or items in Outlook Web App?
Answer:

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Accidents happen. When you accidentally delete an email message, contact, calendar item, or task, you will be glad to know that you can sometimes recover such items using Outlook Web App. For example, you can recover deleted items if they still remain in your Deleted Items folder. You can also recover some items even after the Deleted Items folder is emptied. How long items will be recoverable depends on settings that are controlled by your admin.

If you’re using Microsoft Outlook, see How do I recovery messages or items in Outlook?

Recover an item that’s still in your Deleted Items folder

  1.  In your email folder list, select Deleted Items.
  2. To restore a message, do one of the following:
  • To restore a message to your Inbox, right-click the item and click Move > Inbox.

    

  • To restore a message to a different folder, right-click the item, and click Move > More. Then, specify a folder location, and then click Move.

 To restore a calendar item, contact, or task, right-click the item, and then click one of the following:

    Move to Calendar.

    Move to Contacts.

    Move to Tasks.

Recover an item that’s no longer in your Deleted Items folder

  1. In your email folder list, right-click Deleted Items, and then click Recover deleted items.

     

  2. Select the item you want, and then select Recover.

  • The item will be moved to its default location. Messages will go to your Inbox, calendar items will go to your Calendar, contacts to your Contacts folder, and tasks to your Tasks folder.

You can also purge items that are shown in the Recover deleted items box. Select the item, and then click Purge. If you purge an item, you won’t be able to use Recover deleted items to get it back. Purging a message won’t remove it from any backups that were made before you purged it.

About the Deleted Items folder

When you delete a message, it’s first moved to the Deleted Items folder. You can either let messages stay there until you remove them, or you can set Outlook Web App to automatically empty your Deleted Items folder each time you sign out. Your administrator may have set up a policy to remove items from your Deleted Items folder after they’ve been there a set number of days. Your admin may have also specified how long items that have been deleted from your Deleted Items folder remain available for recovery. For example, there may be a policy that removes anything that’s been in your Deleted Items folder for 30 days, and another policy that lets you retrieve items that have been deleted from the folder for up to another 15 days.

If you are using Office 365, items deleted from your Deleted Items folder remain recoverable for 14 days by default.


 
 
 

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