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Outlook | Recovering Deleted Items | Pine
Most users, when they have finished with an item of e-mail, delete it. However, some do not realize that this does not, of itself, remove the mail from the inbox, merely tag it in some way as being deleted and removable. Leaving it in this state wastes the spool area with unwanted items, and further action may be required permanently to remove it from the mailbox.
The Service controls this problem by having mail quotas to limit the total amount of mail any user may have, including deleted but un-removed mail. Quotas allow staff to accumulate 300 megabytes of e-mail, and students 100 megabytes.
The Service does not wish these measures to inconvenience users, and we strongly advise
users to maintain their e-mail in such a way as to avoid our procedures being applied. This
includes removing deleted mail By far the simplest procedure is to follow the
instructions below for configuring your mailer to discard the deleted items when you exit;
which need only be done once and then the system takes care of the problem. If for some
reason you do not wish to do this, the equivalent manual procedures should be performed
regularly.
In Outlook, deleting an item causes it to be moved to the Deleted Items folder (unless it is already there). While there, it may be treated just like any other item: read, replied to, moved to other folders, even deleted (deleting an item from the Deleted Items folder does actually remove it from your account. However, they may be recovered for a period of 28 days afterwards. See "Recovering Deleted Items" below),
We strongly recommend users to configure Outlook so that the Deleted Items folder is emptied every time you exit. Click on Options from the Tools menu, then on the Other tag, and click the box as shown:
If this automatic removal deletes an item you realise you still want, there is a way to retrieve it. Even after items have been removed from your mailbox, either by deletion from your Deleted Items folder or permanent deletion from any other folder, 28 days elapse before they are purged from the system and irretrievably lost. During this time, you may change your mind and selectively pull back removed files into the folder from which they were removed. This is done by the Recover Deleted Items from the Tools menu: go to the folder in question, mouse click on Tools, then on Recover Deleted Items. This brings up a window containing all your removed items still not purged from the system, from which you may select one (mouseclick it), a range (mouseclick on the first, shift-mouseclick on the last), or all (use the strange icon on the far left of the control bar). Finally, click on the icon 2nd from the left, and the selected item(s) will be restored.
After 28 days, removed items are purged from the Exchange database, and the space reused. After this, the items must be considered lost beyond recall.
Notes:
If, for any reason, you should not want your deleted mail to be removed automatically,
you should regularly do so manually, by using the Empty "Deleted
Items" Folder from the Tools menu. Mouse click on Tools,
then on Empty "Deleted Items" Folder, confirm that you actually do want
to do that, and the folder will be emptied. This may take some time, and a display will
show you how the task is progressing.
In Pine, deleting an item merely flags it as deleted. A letter D is placed against its line in the list of items. This remains until the item is Expunged. In this state, the item may be treated just as any other, and it may also be undeleted should you so wish. Should you exit pine with deleted items, you will be asked if you wish them to be Expunged, unless you have set one of the options expunge-without-confirm which will automatically expunge your Inbox and any of the Incoming Folders, or expunge-without-confirm-everywhere which will do so in all folders. To set these, select SETUP from the main screen, then option Config, then scroll down to highlight the relevent option and type a carriage return to set or unset it. Type E to exit SETUP, and confirm you wish to make the change.
Note that Expunging is final ... the items are purged from the mail system, and cannot be recovered.