Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Recover hard deleted emails in Outlook 2007 when 'Recover Deleted Items' didn't work

I am aware of the fact that keeping unnecessary files on Outlook mailbox only increases the size of the PST file which leads to problems like slow performance of Outlook, PST file corruption, etc. Therefore, I delete all the unwanted emails permanently from the mailbox of my MS Outlook 2007 on a regular basis. Another day while deleting emails, I accidentally deleted some most important emails. I realized the problem after giving command for hard (permanent) deletion of the selected emails. Though I performed some measures to over come this situation but none of them worked. However, I didn’t lose hope and used third-party deleted email recovery software and recovered all my deleted emails.

Let me explain the entire episode by which I learnt about software to recover deleted emails. That time attending an important client call was more important than concerning the deleted email issue thus I kept this matter of email loss from Outlook mailbox aside for sometime. The client call stretched to three long hours and soon after its completion, I forgot about email loss and rushed to home as it was already too late. Coming next day to office, while I was opening my system recalled that I deleted some important emails yesterday. I searched over the Internet for some inbuilt utility of Microsoft by which we can recover deleted emails and I was right, there was a way to recover recently deleted emails.

Though this procedure works only for recently deleted emails but still I tried below mentioned Microsoft prescribed steps to recover deleted emails:
  • Start MS Outlook 2007
  • Select the folder from which you have deleted the emails as I selected the Inbox folder from the left pane of my Outlook mailbox.
  • Go to ToolsRecover Deleted Items. A window that displays the deleted emails from the selected folder appears. I didn’t get this window. So, I terminated the process. However, if you are getting this window then select the emails which you want to recover and click ‘Recover Selected Items’ option.
  • All the selected emails will be selected to its original location as soon as you select ‘Recover Deleted Items’ option.

Since, I didn’t delete the mails recently and also got so many emails after the deletion thus aforementioned steps didn’t work for me. In such situation, without losing hope I searched over the Internet for some resolution by which I can recover deleted emails and learnt that there are third-party tools which can recover emails which are deleted long ago.

One of the awards winning and user recommended tools which I found in this category was Stellar Phoenix Deleted Email Recovery. This software efficiently recovers deleted emails, attachments, notes, and contacts and has very interactive user interface. Therefore, I used this software and recovered all the deleted emails.