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Toll Free: +44 800 088 5522 
Toll Free: +1 888 900 4529
| Toll Free: +44 800 088 5522 MS Exchange undoubtedly provides a brilliant email application service and has many features which accelerate the execution of Exchange Server in convenient way. One more concern which is mostly faced by Exchange users is how to recover deleted emails from Outlook Exchange Server. This section will discuss about the fundamentals of deletion in Exchange environment and will also show some strategies to get back the deleted data files.
Soft Deletion & Hard Deletion
Deletion in Exchange Server environment are of two types; Soft Delete and Hard Delete.
Soft Deletion means the basic deletion which is done by pressing DELETE key after which the item is moved to the Deleted Items Folder.
Hard Deletion however completely removes the item from the server and is done using SHIFT+DELETE keys.
So when does user hard delete certain Exchange item? When any user is using MS Outlook and accidentally or genuinely press SHIFT+DELETE any message it is permanently deleted. When any user works on Internet Message Protocol 4 (IMAP4) client or any other client, the deleted message does not move to deleted item folder it is instead deleted permanently.
Plan Before Exchange Server Installation
As it is said, precaution is always better than cure and hence pre-planning of data maintenance has to be done while you configure Exchange server. Exchange server has default settings to keep the deleted data (messages) for 7 days and deleted accounts for 30 days. However, these settings can be changed according to our needs ensuring that space of hard disk is enough to store deleted items.
General Users:
It is mailbox store level of setting and thus users can fetch back the data which was hard deleted before 7 days. But for many other cases the user might have some important designation such as President, CIOs, etc and for such kind of important users some different values as days for retention can be used.
Specific Users:
Outlook Can Help You Recover Deleted Messages
The messages which were deleted from Deleted Items folders are recoverable from the MS Outlook client application. You can easily recover deleted emails from Outlook Exchange Server by following below mentioned method.
Go to; Outlook>>Tools>>Recover Deleted Items
Once you go for Recover Deleted Items another window with list of deleted items will open. In this list you will be able to see choices of deleting messages permanently or recover the messages.
This methodology will be operative only for the soft deleted items which are stored in Deleted Items folder. In general whenever is deleted from any folder (other than Deleted Items Folder) it is first stored in the deleted items folder. But in case this is not happening with your MS Outlook then you will have to fix it at your own by modi fying the registry in order to recover deleted emails from Outlook Exchange Server.
How to Modify the Outlook Registry?
In order to modify the registry, one has to add one element in the registry of the system which has the functionality of letting recover Deleted Items work for all of the Outlook folders. This entry is DumpsterAlwaysOn which has to be added in the registry and can be added post following the steps;
Once you are done with this modification the Recover Deleted Items functionality will be allied to all Outlook folders.
OWA Is Another Approach to Recover Deleted Items
One can also use OWA (Outlook Web Access) to recover the deleted items. When you open the Deleted Items section, Recover Deleted Items icon will appear above. This button will appear only when you select the Deleted Items section and not with other folders so hard deletion from other folders will not let us see deleted messages.
Verify the Recovery Process with OWA:
To cross check the OWA recovery method you can try the deletion of message on any random user mailbox from Inbox. Here will try to delete two messages by SHIFT+DEL, once you do so a dialog box will open click OK to continue.
Use the following syntax in Internet Explorer in order to fetch back the recently deleted messages;
http://<server>/exchange/<user>/<folder>/?cmd=ShowDeleted
Where:
<server> : Server name
<user> : user who has deleted some important messages
<folder> : Folder that the important messages were deleted
Right after you run this syntax another page will be open in front of you. This will contain all the deleted messages.
In this page, you will again get two options. Either you can recover selected message or permanently deleted the message from Exchange database.
In many cases the folders which have hard deleted items have spaces in their names. In that case the syntax must be used with %20 between words. For e.g. if user name is ABC with Inbox name ABC XYZ then the syntax can be used as;
http://<server>/exchange/<user>/<ABC%20XYZ>/?cmd=ShowDeleted
Corruption in Exchange Database Can Be A Roadblock
These methods to recover deleted emails from Outlook Exchange Server and OWA can be easily utilized to recover the messaged from the user mailboxes but in case you Exchange database are corrupted then these methods might not work. In case you are having corrupted Exchange databases and want to recover the deleted items which are saved in the Deleted Items folder then you can take help of a third party software like Exchange Recovery which is capable to provide you recovery of email messages of Deleted Items Folder.
