Recovering ‘Hard’ Deleted Items in Outlook 2007

Posted on October 28th, 2009.

This morning, somewhere between coffee #2 and coffee #3, I performed what can only be described as an acrobatic but really-unfortunate series of keystrokes that resulted in all the items in my Inbox being hard-deleted.

I’m not shy to use the shift-delete feature to hard delete emails that I know I’m never going to need (after all, how many fake Rolexes can one man own?). But today I must’ve done a CTRL+A prior to my SHIFT+DEL and that’s bad news.

As you stare at a completely barren Inbox, you kinda get that sinking feeling – like when you realize you’ve lost your wallet, or see flashing police-cruiser lights in your rear-view mirror. I only had 11 items in my Inbox – I use my Inbox like a ToDo list – so it could have been worse. Nonetheless it would be less painful if I could just get those items back rather than trying to recall what they all were.

But the Internets had my back! I found a Tech Net article that totally helped me out. Outlook 2007 has this awesome feature: Tools—>Recover Deleted Items. You can sort the list of items by Date Deleted and using this I was able to get my 11 items back. Sinking feeling gone; Cop only gave me a warning this time, but suggested I slow down on the keyboard next time.

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