Here are the most common ways to lose email, and what to do about them. See our Recover Deleted Items article for detailed instructions. After the Deleted Items folder is emptied, items are held in a dumpster for 30 days, and you can usually find missing items there. It first keeps deleted items in a special folder called Deleted Items, (some programs label this as Trash). The good news is that Exchange doesn't really delete mail items until 30 days after you've told it to. It's impractical to restore an entire Exchange database to restore a single mailbox. We back up the Exchange database as a whole, as a protection against disaster.
It's always an action by one of these programs that makes mail disappear. The mail server handles the actual delivery of new mail to an Exchange account, but all other changes and actions are made through an email program such as Outlook. Many conversations with upset users start one of two ways: "Your mail server lost my mail" or "Can you restore my mail?" Let's deal with those first.Īctually, that has never been the case in any of the reports we have investigated. An analogy using the phone system is that the telephone on your desk is a client, and Verizon is the server. Outlook on the Web is also a mail client, but a web-based one that you access through a web browser. Email clients are programs such as Outlook, Mail, and Thunderbird that run on your desktop or mobile phone, and access mail on the mail server. Cornell's email server is Exchange 2010 from Microsoft.
This article distinguishes between email servers and email programs (email programs are also called email clients or apps).