One of the most common problems faced by the users of Microsoft’s Outlook email client is that they sometimes hard delete the items in their inbox. Once the items are hard deleted they don’t appear on the deleted items folder. Lets see how to fix this problem.
Microsoft’s Outlook is used by millions of users for managing their email accounts and other personal information. Outlook allows users to manage their emails and attachments, create notes, calender entries, tasks, maintain a journal or even browse the internet. Due to simple nature and portability of the program is used by individuals and organisations to manage email accounts. The program is available as a stand-alone version or can be used on the Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Sharepoint Server. The latter two are mostly used by organisations who have to manage a massive number of email accounts. One of the most common problem faced by users is that they sometimes hard delete an item on their inbox. As most of the time, the ‘Recover Deleted Items’ functionality is only enabled on the Deleted Items folder and not on other folders such as Inbox, Drafts and Sent Items, when users accidentally delete file, it gets hard deleted instead of going to the Deleted Items folder. For Outlook recovery, users can fix the problem in two ways, they can use the ‘Fix it for me’ tool or they can use the ‘Let me fix it myself’ tool. Keep in mind that the ‘Fix it for me tool’ will only enable the Recover Deleted Items functionality on other folders such as the Sent items folder, Outbox folder or the Drafts folder. The changes will be applied to the folders only after you enable the settings. Items which were hard deleted before this will not be recovered. For recovering them, users would have to go to the Deleted Item Recovery on the Tools menu of the Outlook program. Users can automatically fix the problem of hard deleting items on Outlook using the ‘Fix it for me’ tool offered by Microsoft. You can get this tool by simply clicking on the ‘Fix this problem’ link and then clicking on ‘Run’ to download the program. Once the file gets downloaded, follow the instruction that appear and fix the problem without doing much. Outlook recovery can also be performed using the ‘Let me fix it myself’ option made available by Microsoft. This can be done by changing the registry of the application. Be wary of the fact that when the changes in the registry are not done properly then serious problems can occur. In order to avoid this, it is best if you make a back-up of the current registry file before proceeding with the changes. As in the previous, be aware that the Recover Deleted Items functionality is only enabled on the Deleted Items folder by default. In order to enable the functionality on other folders such as Sent and Draft folders, first start the registry editor and locate the registry that needs to be changed. Then, click this key in the registry : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options. After this, access the Edit menu and click on ‘Add Value’ and add the following value to the registry Value name: DumpsterAlwaysOn Data type: DWORD Value data: 1. Users can also perform Outlook recovery using the DataNumen Outlook Repair tool offered by DataNumen.