Douggie said:
I use Outlook 2007 in Windows 7 and I accidentally deleted my entire Inbox
contents. It has some urgent items relating to my volunteer work & I must
retrieve them because it involves too many people to ask them to resend these
messages. Can someone please help.
Are they in the Deleted Items folder? If you used Shift+Del or did the
deletes from the Deleted Items folder, what was it about "permanent" that
you did not understand?
Are you willing to use low-level database editing tools to dig into the
message store (.pst file)? There are tools for that but only if you or
Outlook have not yet compacted the message store. Better make a copy of the
..pst file now if you plan on drilling down into its structure to change the
status of records stored there. If you are willing to drill into editing
the message store, I have a couple of hints of how that is done regarding
stuck read reciepts that might provide some guidance on how to dig into the
..pst file. I don't know of a guide that tells you exactly to undo what you
did when using these files but they do let you drill into the database.
So why not use your backups? If you don't backup, you deem your data as
worthless or reproducible. Does your e-mail provider have backups? Unless
this at work using Exchange or you pay for a business-class e-mail account,
it is unlikely your e-mail provider backs up anything of your account. If
you have daily-scheduled backups, you should restore the .pst file from
there. Of course, you'll lose any changes made to that file since the last
time you saved a backup. While you can use backup programs that save files
all across your drives, there is also a Personal Folders Backup add-on that
you could install in Outlook to periodically save a copy of just the .pst
file. If you already have the PFB add-on installed, you could grab the
backup copy of the .pst file unless it is too old because PFB was configured
with a wide interval for the backup schedule.
