Recover Deleted Items in Outlook

Introduction

How do I find items that I accidentally deleted from Outlook?

Instructions

When you accidentally delete an item from your Outlook mailbox, you can often recover it. The first place to look for a deleted item, such as an email message, calendar appointment, contact, or task is the Deleted Items folder in your mailbox. If you can't find it there, the next place to look is the Recoverable Items folder, which you can access by using the Recover Deleted Items tool.

You can recover a deleted folder (with all of its messages) if the message is still in your Deleted Items folder .Unfortunately, you can't recover a folder that's been permanently deleted. But you can use the steps in this topic to recover messages from the Recoverable Items folder that were in a folder when it was permanently deleted.

Please visit the Microsoft Office Support web site for additional information related to recovering deleted items in Outlook.

Folders

Outlook irretrievably throws away your folder and mixes the contents in with the rest of the deleted Items, all likely sorted by the date received.

You can add a column to show when it was modified, sort by that, then grab the items out that were deleted at that time.

* These are instructions for a Windows machine using the local Oulook application

1. Create a folder to put them in.
2. Go to the Deleted Items folder, choose the View tab, then View Settings, and Columns button.
3. Change the drop down from Frequently-used fields to All Mail fields.
4. Scroll down to find Modified and click the Add button to add it to the list on the right.
5. Click on Modified so that it is highlighted and then click the Move Up and Move Down buttons to position where it will appear such as next to the Subject column.
6. Click Okay twice to confirm and get back to your Deleted Items. You should now see the Modified column and can sort by that to group when items were deleted.
7. Select the group of messages you want (click the top item, then hold Shift and click the bottom item).
8. Drag these to the folder you created in step 1.