Doesn’t that sound just wrong? “Recovering” and “permanently deleted” in the same sentence like that?
Since my last post about one little registry setting suddenly making months or a years’ worth of “deleted” email reappear, I’ve gotten a flurry of responses. Among the interesting mentions:
-You don’t need the registry hack in Outlook 2007; only Outlook 2003.
-If you really want to delete something, you’ll have to move it from your server to a PST file, then compact that file.
-I don’t know that I trust that, either…
-There are commercial tools for this (which you can use on a trial basis in an emergency), for instance RecoverMyEmail at
http://www.recovermyemail.com/.
-If you’re a Do-It-Yourselfer (or a Do-It-For-Free-er) there are some good user articles, for instance
http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/ie/recover-deleted-email-in-microsoft-outlook-from-any-folder/.
This capability represents, depending on your perspective, a terrific opportunity to rescue some hapless user (or yourself) and look like an IT demigod, or a horrifying feature, of which most users will be oblivious, that will inevitably result in a very, very nasty legal situation. Techs and security take note.
Special thanks to Subnet7 and Herbbie for their contributions.