How to Recover Deleted Emails

If you have accidentally deleted an important email, perhaps while you were organizing your inbox and getting rid of spam and other unwanted messages, there’s still a chance to get it back! In this article, we provide general instructions on how to recover deleted emails regardless of which email service you use, and we also provide detailed instructions on how to recover deleted emails from Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and several other email providers.

How to Recover Your Deleted Emails

  1. Go to your inbox.
  2. Open the trash folder.
  3. Select the emails you want to recover.
  4. Move the emails back to your inbox by clicking on the Move or Recover button.
  5. Return to your inbox and look for the recovered emails.

How to Recover Deleted Emails from Gmail

When you delete an email in Gmail inbox, it goes to the trash folder instead of being deleted straight away. It stays in the Trash folder for 30 days before it gets permanently deleted. Keep in mind that there’s no way how to recover permanently deleted emails from Gmail. Because the clock starts ticking the second an email enters the trash folder, you need to hurry up before it’s too late.

  1. Open your Gmail account.
  2. Choose “Trash” from the menu on the left.
  3. Select the deleted email you want to recover.
  4. Click on the “Move” icon. It looks like a file folder.
  5. Choose “Inbox” or any other folder where you would like to move the deleted email.
How to recover deleted emails from Gmail

If you miss the 30-day deadline and discover that the email you would like to recover has already been permanently deleted, we have bad news for you: there’s no way how you can recover it.

However, there’s still a glimmer of hope that Google’s support team will be able to recover it on your behalf using special admin tools only they can access.

  1. Open your Gmail account.
  2. Go to the missing emails support page.
  3. Enter your contact information and provide a brief description of your problem. You should tell Google that you’ve missed the 30-day deadline and lost an important email that you would like to recover.
  4. Click the Submit button and wait for a reply.

How to Recover Deleted Emails from Yahoo

Losing an important email from your Yahoo inbox is never fun, especially if you’re responsible for the mess because you clicked on the wrong button. Fortunately for you, we know how you can recover deleted Yahoo emails:

  1. Open your Yahoo! Mail account.
  2. Navigate to the “Trash” folder.
  3. Select the deleted email you want to recover.
  4. Click on the “Move” icon. It looks like a file folder.
  5. Choose “Inbox” or any other folder where you would like to move the deleted email.
How to recover deleted emails from Yahoo

By default, emails stay in the trash folder for one week. You can change this by opening the Security tab and choosing a different time period. If you miss the 7-day deadline, there’s, unfortunately, nothing else you can do as Yahoo clearly states that “messages can only be restored if lost or deleted in the last 7 days.” So, that’s your answer to how to recover permanently deleted emails from yahoo.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in Outlook

Outlook.com has a very robust system for recovering deleted emails. Everything that ends up in the Deleted Items and Junk Email folders is recoverable for 30 days. In some cases, you can even recover items after the Deleted Items folder is emptied by contacting Outlook’s customer support.

  1. Open your Outlook email account.
  2. Select the Deleted Items folder from the menu on the left.
  3. For the Deleted Items folder, select the message you want to recover and select Restore.
  4. Go back to your inbox to see the recovered message.
How to recover deleted emails in Outlook

If you miss the 30-day recovery deadline, it’s still worth a shot to contact Outlook’s customer support and ask them if they could recover the deleted email for you. That’s the only way how to recover permanently deleted emails in Outlook.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in AOL Mail

Accidentally deleting the wrong email messages in AOL Mail isn’t the end of the world because they stay in the Trash folder for seven days. If you act quickly and recover the deleted emails from the Trash folder in time, you won’t experience any data loss whatsoever. This is what you need to do:

  1. Open your AOL Mail account.
  2. Select the Trash folder from the list of folders in the left panel.
  3. Select the message you want to restore.
  4. Click the More button located in the top toolbar and select the Move to option.
  5. Recover your deleted emails to any folder you want.

What happens if you take more than seven days to recover deleted AOL Mail emails? AOL Mail will delete them permanently to free up email storage space. Unfortunately, permanently deleted emails can’t be restored.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in Mail.com

The good news is that email messages deleted in Mail.com are not completely gone until they are deleted from the Trash folder. The bad news is that Mail.com empties the Trash folder after just one day. That’s right, Mail.com gives its users only one day to realize they’ve made a mistake, while most other email providers keep deleted emails in the Trash folder for at least a week. Interestingly, the default storage time for spam emails is 30 days.

If you’re lucky, and you still have some time left before Mail.com automatically empties the Trash folder, you can follow the steps below, which explain how to recover deleted email in Mail.com:

  1. Open your Mail.com account.
  2. Switch to the E-mail tab.
  3. Go to the Trash folder and select the email messages you want to recover.
  4. Move the selected email messages back to your inbox.

We highly recommend you check the storage time limits in Mail.com because the default values are not exactly reasonable:

  1. Hover your mouse cursor over any email folder.
  2. Click the wrench icon.
  3. Adjust the storage time limit.
  4. Confirm by clicking OK.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in Yandex Mail

Just because Yandex Mail increased the basic storage capacity from 20 MB to 10 GB doesn't mean that you shouldn't delete old emails to keep your inbox organized. But what if you make a mistake and accidentally delete the wrong email? Fortunately, you can retrieve it from the Trash folder, where it goes automatically after you click the Delete button. To retrieve it from the Trash folder:

  1. Open your Yandex Mail account.
  2. Go to the Trash Folder.
  3. Select the deleted email message.
  4. Click To folder and choose the folder where you want to restore it.

Yandex Mail permanently deletes email messages located in the Trash folder after 31 days. All messages located in the Spam folder are deleted after 10 days.

If you decided for the most radical clean-up option possible and deleted your entire Yandex Mail account, only to realize a few days later that it contains important emails that you want to save, you can restore access to it within 30 days from deleting it:

  1. Go to the restore access page.
  2. Enter the username you want to restore the password for.
  3. Restore account access using a confirmed phone number or email address.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in ProtonMail

Known for its security and privacy, ProtonMail offers a free encrypted email services that works on any device without software install. All messages stored on ProtonMail's servers are encrypted, and they remain encrypted even when they're transmitted between ProtonMail users.

Because all encryption happens on the devices of ProtonMail users, the company has no way of decrypting the data stored on its servers. That's great news for users who don't want their personal data and sensitive information to be handed over to third parties, but it's bad news for those who want to recover deleted emails or account because that's simply not possible.

That's right, when you delete an email message in ProtonMail, that email message is gone for good, and even ProtonMail employees can't recover it. The same is true if you forget your password: you won't be able to access your account again.

If you want to avoid losing important emails, you can use ProtonMail's Import-Export application to export them to your computer.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in iCloud Mail

To recover deleted email in iCloud Mail:

  1. Open your iCloud Mail account.
  2. Select the Trash folder, located in the left panel.
  3. Open the email you want to recover.
  4. Use the Move button to restore it to your inbox.

iCloud Mail keep deleted emails in the Trash folder for 30 days. When the 30-day period is over, messages in the Trash folder are automatically and permanently deleted. To prevent iCloud Mail from moving deleted email messages to the Trash folder:

  1. Click the Action pop-up menu in the sidebar and choose Preferences.
  2. Deselect the Move deleted messages to option located in the General pane.
  3. Click Done.

How Clean Email Can Help Prevent a Disaster

Clean Email is an email inbox organizer that sifts through your inbox for you and uses powerful filters and complex algorithms to figure out which emails you can safely delete and which you should keep.

When Clean Email stumbles upon unwanted emails, it organizes them into easy-to-review bundles (Quick Clean), allowing you to move to Trash, or permanently remove them, as well as apply other actions to entire groups of emails instead of selecting them one by one.

Move to Trash bundles of emails with Clean EmailMove to Trash bundles of emails with Clean Email

What’s more, you can also automate any action you apply to an email or a group of emails to save time in the future. For example, you could automatically delete all marketing emails or move social media notifications to a separate folder so they don’t clutter your inbox.

By keeping your inbox clutter-free using Clean Email, you significantly reduce the chance of accidentally deleting an important email without noticing until it’s finally time to do an inbox cleanup. Clean Email works with all major free and paid email services, including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook, and you can use it directly from your web browser without installing anything on your computer.

Clean Email is available on all devicesClean Email is available on all devices

Conclusion

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to recover deleted emails, especially if it’s been a while since they were trashed. Knowing this, your priority should be to minimize the chance of you accidentally deleting an important email. Clean Email has handy automation features that can keep your inbox organized for you so there’s no need to manually delete emails in the first place.

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