How to restore emails deleted from trash

Deleting an important email can be a nightmare. The good news is that Gmail has made it incredibly easy to undo this process. So simple in fact, that from the Gmail homepage (your inbox) you are only 4 clicks away from un-deleting the email.

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Below are two guides:

  • One to show you how to recover deleted emails from Gmail.
  • A second guide for recovering deleted Gmail emails from your mobile device.

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How to recover deleted emails in Gmail 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to recovering deleted emails from your Gmail account on your desktop. The whole process should take less than 30 seconds.

Step 1 – Gmail’s Trash/Bin folder

Go to your Gmail inbox. 

On the left of the screen, there is a list of folders (Inbox, Starred, Spam, etc). Your deleted emails will be in a folder called “Trash”, or “Bin” (these are the same folder, but named differently depending on the user’s language settings).

If you can’t see a folder called “Trash” or “Bin”, then click “More” at the bottom of the list. This will show all your Gmail folders, and you will now find the correct folder.

Note: Many of your other folders will have a number to the right of them. This is the number of unread emails that are in this folder. However, the Trash/Bin folder will never show a number, despite it containing unread emails.

How to restore emails deleted from trash

Step 2 – Recover your deleted email

Now that you’ve found the folder containing your deleted emails, you can start to recover them. Look inside the folder for the email you wish to recover and click on the box to the far left of the email row to select the email.

How to restore emails deleted from trash

Once you’ve found and selected the right emails, click “Move to” in the row of buttons above the list of emails. From the drop-down menu that now appears, you can select where to put the deleted email.

How to restore emails deleted from trash

Moving it to any folder except the “Trash” or “Bin” folder will recover the email from deletion. If you don’t want to organize the email, you can simply click the “Inbox” option, and the deleted email will be put back in your inbox.

Recover deleted Gmail emails on iOS/Android

The process for recovering deleted emails from Gmail is pretty much the same for mobile devices as on desktop.

First, find the deleted email in the folder named “Trash” or “Bin”.

When you’ve found the email in the folder, tap it to open it.

Once the deleted email is open, you’ll see three dots in the top-right corner of the screen. Tap this button, and the options for email actions will appear.

How to restore emails deleted from trash

From these options, press “Move to”. Select a new folder – “Inbox” will work fine if you don’t want to organize the email elsewhere.

With this done, the email will be recovered from deletion, and won’t be removed from your inbox after 30 days.

How to recover deleted emails in Gmail after 30 days

Gmail deletes all messages that have been in the “Trash”/”Bin” or the “Spam” folder for more than 30 days. This is done automatically and permanently and is impossible to undo or to recover these emails. 

Note: These are the only folders from which Gmail will automatically delete emails. If your emails are being deleted from other folders, such as “Inbox” or “Sent”, then an external third party is doing this, and you should contact Google Support.

Emails deleted from the trash in Gmail

In the Trash folder of Gmail, there is an option for “Delete forever”. This is a very literally-named button. Emails deleted from Gmail’s Trash folder are removed permanently. There is no way to get them back.

So, be careful when clicking “Delete forever” in Gmail. Emails in the Trash folder are automatically deleted after 30 days, so it’s recommended to simply leave the email there. If you do need to recover the email, you’ll have a window of a month to do so.

When you delete an email in Gmail inbox, it goes to the trash folder instead of being deleted straight away. It stays in the Trash folder for 30 days before it gets permanently deleted. Keep in mind that there’s no way how to recover permanently deleted emails from Gmail. Because the clock starts ticking the second an email enters the trash folder, you need to hurry up before it’s too late.

  1. Open your Gmail account.
  2. Choose “Trash” from the menu on the left.
  3. Select the deleted email you want to recover.
  4. Click on the “Move” icon. It looks like a file folder.
  5. Choose “Inbox” or any other folder where you would like to move the deleted email.

How to restore emails deleted from trash

If you miss the 30-day deadline and discover that the email you would like to recover has already been permanently deleted, we have bad news for you: there’s no way how you can recover it.

However, there’s still a glimmer of hope that Google’s support team will be able to recover it on your behalf using special admin tools only they can access.

  1. Open your Gmail account.
  2. Go to the missing emails support page.
  3. Enter your contact information and provide a brief description of your problem. You should tell Google that you’ve missed the 30-day deadline and lost an important email that you would like to recover.
  4. Click the Submit button and wait for a reply.

How to Recover Deleted Emails from Yahoo

Losing an important email from your Yahoo inbox is never fun, especially if you’re responsible for the mess because you clicked on the wrong button. Fortunately for you, we know how you can recover deleted Yahoo emails:

  1. Open your Yahoo! Mail account.
  2. Navigate to the “Trash” folder.
  3. Select the deleted email you want to recover.
  4. Click on the “Move” icon. It looks like a file folder.
  5. Choose “Inbox” or any other folder where you would like to move the deleted email.

How to restore emails deleted from trash

By default, emails stay in the trash folder for one week. You can change this by opening the Security tab and choosing a different time period. If you miss the 7-day deadline, there’s, unfortunately, nothing else you can do as Yahoo clearly states that “messages can only be restored if lost or deleted in the last 7 days.” So, that’s your answer to how to recover permanently deleted emails from yahoo.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in Outlook

Outlook.com has a very robust system for recovering deleted emails. Everything that ends up in the Deleted Items and Junk Email folders is recoverable for 30 days. In some cases, you can even recover items after the Deleted Items folder is emptied by contacting Outlook’s customer support.

  1. Open your Outlook email account.
  2. Select the Deleted Items folder from the menu on the left.
  3. For the Deleted Items folder, select the message you want to recover and select Restore.
  4. Go back to your inbox to see the recovered message.

How to restore emails deleted from trash

If you miss the 30-day recovery deadline, it’s still worth a shot to contact Outlook’s customer support and ask them if they could recover the deleted email for you. That’s the only way how to recover permanently deleted emails in Outlook.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in AOL Mail

Accidentally deleting the wrong email messages in AOL Mail isn’t the end of the world because they stay in the Trash folder for seven days. If you act quickly and recover the deleted emails from the Trash folder in time, you won’t experience any data loss whatsoever. This is what you need to do:

  1. Open your AOL Mail account.
  2. Select the Trash folder from the list of folders in the left panel.
  3. Select the message you want to restore.
  4. Click the More button located in the top toolbar and select the Move to option.
  5. Recover your deleted emails to any folder you want.

What happens if you take more than seven days to recover deleted AOL Mail emails? AOL Mail will delete them permanently to free up email storage space. Unfortunately, permanently deleted emails can’t be restored.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in Mail.com

The good news is that email messages deleted in Mail.com are not completely gone until they are deleted from the Trash folder. The bad news is that Mail.com empties the Trash folder after just one day. That’s right, Mail.com gives its users only one day to realize they’ve made a mistake, while most other email providers keep deleted emails in the Trash folder for at least a week. Interestingly, the default storage time for spam emails is 30 days.

If you’re lucky, and you still have some time left before Mail.com automatically empties the Trash folder, you can follow the steps below, which explain how to recover deleted email in Mail.com:

  1. Open your Mail.com account.
  2. Switch to the E-mail tab.
  3. Go to the Trash folder and select the email messages you want to recover.
  4. Move the selected email messages back to your inbox.

We highly recommend you check the storage time limits in Mail.com because the default values are not exactly reasonable:

  1. Hover your mouse cursor over any email folder.
  2. Click the wrench icon.
  3. Adjust the storage time limit.
  4. Confirm by clicking OK.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in Yandex Mail

Just because Yandex Mail increased the basic storage capacity from 20 MB to 10 GB doesn't mean that you shouldn't delete old emails to keep your inbox organized. But what if you make a mistake and accidentally delete the wrong email? Fortunately, you can retrieve it from the Trash folder, where it goes automatically after you click the Delete button. To retrieve it from the Trash folder:

  1. Open your Yandex Mail account.
  2. Go to the Trash Folder.
  3. Select the deleted email message.
  4. Click To folder and choose the folder where you want to restore it.

Yandex Mail permanently deletes email messages located in the Trash folder after 31 days. All messages located in the Spam folder are deleted after 10 days.

If you decided for the most radical clean-up option possible and deleted your entire Yandex Mail account, only to realize a few days later that it contains important emails that you want to save, you can restore access to it within 30 days from deleting it:

  1. Go to the restore access page.
  2. Enter the username you want to restore the password for.
  3. Restore account access using a confirmed phone number or email address.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in ProtonMail

Known for its security and privacy, ProtonMail offers a free encrypted email services that works on any device without software install. All messages stored on ProtonMail's servers are encrypted, and they remain encrypted even when they're transmitted between ProtonMail users.

Because all encryption happens on the devices of ProtonMail users, the company has no way of decrypting the data stored on its servers. That's great news for users who don't want their personal data and sensitive information to be handed over to third parties, but it's bad news for those who want to recover deleted emails or account because that's simply not possible.

That's right, when you delete an email message in ProtonMail, that email message is gone for good, and even ProtonMail employees can't recover it. The same is true if you forget your password: you won't be able to access your account again.

If you want to avoid losing important emails, you can use ProtonMail's Import-Export application to export them to your computer.

How to Recover Deleted Emails in iCloud Mail

To recover deleted email in iCloud Mail:

  1. Open your iCloud Mail account.
  2. Select the Trash folder, located in the left panel.
  3. Open the email you want to recover.
  4. Use the Move button to restore it to your inbox.

iCloud Mail keep deleted emails in the Trash folder for 30 days. When the 30-day period is over, messages in the Trash folder are automatically and permanently deleted. To prevent iCloud Mail from moving deleted email messages to the Trash folder:

  1. Click the Action pop-up menu in the sidebar and choose Preferences.
  2. Deselect the Move deleted messages to option located in the General pane.
  3. Click Done.

How Clean Email Can Help Prevent a Disaster

Clean Email is an email inbox organizer that sifts through your inbox for you and uses powerful filters and complex algorithms to figure out which emails you can safely delete and which you should keep.

When Clean Email stumbles upon unwanted emails, it organizes them into easy-to-review bundles (Quick Clean), allowing you to move to Trash, or permanently remove them, as well as apply other actions to entire groups of emails instead of selecting them one by one.

How to restore emails deleted from trash
How to restore emails deleted from trash

What’s more, you can also automate any action you apply to an email or a group of emails to save time in the future. For example, you could automatically delete all marketing emails or move social media notifications to a separate folder so they don’t clutter your inbox.

By keeping your inbox clutter-free using Clean Email, you significantly reduce the chance of accidentally deleting an important email without noticing until it’s finally time to do an inbox cleanup. Clean Email works with all major free and paid email services, including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook, and you can use it directly from your web browser without installing anything on your computer.

How to restore emails deleted from trash
How to restore emails deleted from trash

Conclusion

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to recover deleted emails, especially if it’s been a while since they were trashed. Knowing this, your priority should be to minimize the chance of you accidentally deleting an important email. Clean Email has handy automation features that can keep your inbox organized for you so there’s no need to manually delete emails in the first place.

Can you recover emails deleted from Trash?

For up to 30 days after deleting, users can recover their own messages from the Trash by following the steps in Recover deleted Gmail messages. After 30 days, messages are permanently deleted from the Trash, and can't be restored from the Trash by users or administrators.

How do I recover permanently deleted emails?

You can recover deleted emails from Trash if they are still in Trash. After 30 days, emails and messages will be permanently deleted from the Trash and can't be restored normally. However, you can check with the Gmail Support Team to see if they can help you recover the permanently deleted emails.

Are emails deleted from Trash gone forever?

When you delete a message, it stays in your trash for 30 days. After that time, it will be permanently deleted from your account and can't be recovered.

How can I recover permanently deleted files from Trash?

First of all, Open the folder from which you erase the data items. Navigate to Home and then, choose History option. Now, click the Previous and select the deleted files you want to recover. In the last step, click on Restore to get back all the deleted files into a folder.