You have deleted something you needed. Most of the time you can get it back yourself, and there is a second hidden safety net after Deleted Items that very few people know about. Act sooner rather than later, because every one of these options runs on a clock.

Try this first

1. Check Deleted Items. Click the Deleted Items folder in the folder list. If you find the message, right-click it, choose Move, then Other Folder, and pick your Inbox. Do not drag it, because it is easy to drop it in the wrong place.
2. Check the Archive folder. The Archive and Delete buttons sit next to each other in Outlook and on phones, and the swipe gesture on a phone archives by default. A great many missing messages are simply archived, not deleted.
3. Search the whole mailbox. Click the search box, change the scope to Current Mailbox or All Mailboxes, and search for the sender's address rather than the subject.
4. Use the second safety net. If Deleted Items has been emptied, click on the Deleted Items folder, then on the Folder tab click Recover Deleted Items From Server. In Outlook on the web, open Deleted Items and click Recover items deleted from this folder at the top of the list.
5. Pick what you want and restore it. A window opens listing everything removed from that folder recently. Select the items, choose Restore Selected Items, and click OK. They go back to Deleted Items, so look there afterwards, not in your Inbox.

That second net holds items for a limited window after they leave Deleted Items, usually a couple of weeks unless your mailbox has been configured differently. After that they are gone from anywhere you can reach.

If that didn't fix it

Log a ticket and tell us as much as you can. The more precise you are, the better the odds:

• The sender's address and the approximate date and time.
• Any words you remember from the subject line or the body.
• Roughly when it was deleted.
• Whether it was one message, a folder, or everything.

What we can do depends on how your mailbox is set up. There is a period after the second net expires during which items can still be pulled back from the server side. If your business has Microsoft 365 backup in place, the window is much longer and we can restore individual messages, folders, or a whole mailbox to a point in time. If you are not sure whether you have backup, ask, because it is worth knowing before you need it rather than after.

What nobody can do is recover a message that was permanently deleted long ago from a mailbox with no backup. That is why speed matters. Tell us on the day, not next month.

Getting a mailbox back after someone has left

When a staff member leaves, their mailbox should be dealt with deliberately rather than just deleted. Once the account is removed, the mailbox is held for a limited period and then it is gone, along with anything in it.

The usual options are to convert it to a shared mailbox that a colleague can open, which keeps the history and the address live without paying for a licence in most cases, or to export the contents and hand the address to someone else. If you have already deleted the account and now need the mail, get in touch straight away and we will see whether it can still be restored.

Tell us before someone's last day where possible. It costs nothing to plan and it avoids the phone call three weeks later asking whether anyone kept the quotes they were working on.

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.