How to Recover Deleted Emails in Gmail

No matter how gloomy the situation may seem at first, the problem of deleted emails can be solved, and without too much effort. Step by step, this article will throw some light on the email backup and recovery methods for Gmail.

Introduction

Electronic mail, or e-mail has become the primary means of communication when it comes to sending and receiving official queries and replies, advertising messages and office documents. There is no doubt that Gmail is currently one of the most preferable and reliable providers of the email service. Even those who use other means, such as IMAP (which involves a more up-t-date protocol supporting receipt and management of email right on the server) to send and receive emails, do have a Google account, and in most cases prefer using the related email service, Gmail. Dealing with tons of email that everyone receives these days, it seems so easy to remove an important message – deliberately or by mistake. Yet when you realize you need the emails you have deleted, bringing them back becomes a more challenging task than you could expect. That is when an absolutely logical question suggests itself: how can a deleted email be restored, and how many ways are there to make it possible? The best option for anyone using Gmail service to keep their emails intact and secure would be to back them up.

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However, just removing an email is not the only threat it can save you from. Other possible misfortunes include malware effects and fraud attempts. By entering a very commonplace query in the Google search engine, account deleted, you can find a long list of sad stories about Gmail accounts that have been hacked or deleted, and this is one of the main reasons to make users back up their email messages. Most of the time, accounts are hacked because of poor cybersecurity of the servers where user emails are kept. Even such digital giants as Facebook, Microsoft, or Google have suffered from hacking attacks that turned many people to victims of fraudulent activities while they lost their emails and personal photographs. Recent examples include Quora (a private company offering a social question-and-answer platform) that also faced the cybersecurity problem. It becomes evident that no company across the globe, even one of the digital giants, can feel secured against remote hacking attacks and unauthorized access to their servers. Therefore, you can’t be absolutely confident about your data being kept safely somewhere on a company’s server. To reduce external risks, use the opportunity offered by Gmail and keep all your correspondence strictly confidential.

No matter how gloomy the situation may seem at first, the problem of deleted emails can be solved, and without too much effort. Step by step, this article will throw some light on the email backup and recovery methods for Gmail.

1. Mozilla Thunderbird

There are lots of email clients for desktops, and in this article we’ll be using Mozilla Thunderbird as an example to illustrate possible ways of fixing the problem of deleted emails. The logical question: Why do you use this particular app to demonstrate recovering emails deleted from Gmail? does have a reasonable answer. This application works as it should, it is easy to use and sufficient for the task we are dealing with – and that is all we need. There is also a portable version allowing users to save all their data to a flash drive and view it autonomously (i.e. offline).

Creating a backup copy of all emails within your Gmail account takes a few steps. Open the Gmail app and enter email settings by clicking on the gearwheel icon in the right upper corner, and select Settings from the drop-down list.

In the ribbon menu, click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP. In this page, find POP download and check the box for Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded).

Now open Mozilla Thunderbird. When you open it for the first time, the program will ask you to type the email address, password and name which will be displayed to all users. The first field requires the username but the program will automatically insert the name already specified in the registration data of your operating system. Of course, you can change this name into any other name as you wish. In the second field, type the email address registered with Gmail. In the last (third) field, you will be asked for the password to the Gmail account the address of which you have given in the previous field. In the section Accounts, you can also add a new email address in the line Set up an account with the text link Email.

When all the three fields are filled in, click Continue as shown in the picture and Mozilla Thunderbird will receive the required port addresses automatically.

Then check the option next to POP3 (keep mail on your computer) and click Done. Mozilla Thunderbird will create all folders and subfolders to begin downloading emails from your Gmail account. It can take some time which is determined directly by the size of your mailbox and the speed of your Internet connection. When all authorization procedures are complete, you may be asked to sign in to Gmail again and give Mozilla Thunderbird the permissions it needs.

Now, the left panel of the mail client will display the folders containing all emails. By clicking on any of them, you can view the list of emails in the central panel of Mozilla Thunderbird. Just give the program some time to sync your account.

2. Trash for Emails in Gmail

When an email is received, you can leave it in the mailbox or read and then click Delete if you feel it is useless or not worth your attention anymore. Suddenly, now you need the email you didn’t care about at first, and you look for a way to recover it – a few days after it has been removed. Of course, recovering a deleted email is possible, but as always, there can be certain limitations due to internal settings of the Gmail service.

Often, most emails you find in a Gmail mailbox are removed right after being read. That is natural as the main body of all emails is made up of advertising messages and there is no purpose in keeping them. When deleted, an email ends up in the Trash folder where it can be stored as long as thirty days. If you don’t come to recover a specific email before the thirty-days’ safety term expires, Gmail will empty the Trash folder and remove its contents automatically. This is when there are no chances left to recover an email that was deleted.

To recover an email, open Gmail in a web browser or on a mobile device (in this example, we’ll be using Gmail mobile app), and go to the Bin folder (the number of emails in the All mail and Bin folders have been highlighted to see how they change after an email is recovered).

If the guaranteed term of storage for emails in the Bin folder has not expired yet (that is, the email was removed less than thirty days ago), you can find such email in the Bin folder among other elements. To recover an email, you need to move it to the Inbox folder. Find the removed email in the Bin, then press and hold to select it.

Now that it is selected, you can move it elsewhere. If you need to bring back several emails, repeat this step for each one and get them ready for recovery.

In the right upper corner of the screen, tap the control button with three vertical dots on it and open the menu. Choose the option Move to Inbox from the list.

This action will move all selected emails to the Inbox folder and change the number of emails in the folders All mail and Bin (if you compare the number of emails in these folders before and after recovery you can see that the total number of emails in the Bin folder has decreased, and the corresponding number of emails in the folder All mail has increased by the number of emails you selected).

To make sure the email has been recovered, go to the Inbox folder and find it there. Now this email will not disappear and will not be deleted automatically after the 30-day period expires. On the contrary, it will be stored in the mail client and you can access it at any time.

3. Google Takeout

Few people know this trick, but in fact, Users can extract their data from most of the services offered by Google. One of the leading digital companies offers you a chance to download and save locally a copy of all your data stored on Google servers. In other words, you can back up your information from various applications (such as Google Drive, Google Photos, Calendar and others including Gmail) and download the copy to your computer or an online cloud storage. But here’s the question, how? The answer is very easy. Thanks to the Google Takeout project by the Google Data Liberation Front everyone can export their data to a downloadable archive file.

To use this opportunity and download a copy of all your emails, do the following. Open the browser and sign in to your account using the registration data of an account to which a specific mailbox is linked (if you have several accounts).

In the left panel, select Data and personalization. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and find Download, delete or make a plan for your data, then choose Download your data.