Ways to recover hard deleted drafts in Outlook

Have you deleted certain important drafts from your Outlook? No worries! You can easily navigate to Deleted Items folder and retrieve them back. But, if you hard deleted them using shift + delete combination, you are in a grave trouble. Hard deleted mails cannot be recovered from the 'Deleted Items' folder. Thankfully, there are ways to overcome this problem if your Outlook is configured with Microsoft Exchange and your administrator has set it to retain the deleted items for a specific duration of time. To empower yourself to recover permanently deleted e-mails, drafts and other items from Outlook, you must make changes to Windows registry. This way you can perform deleted email recovery very easily.

This article not only explains you how to recover permanent deleted drafts, but also makes you familiar with the hard deletion situations. A regular delete operation can be executed in Outlook by simply hitting the delete key. A draft deleted this way would go to Deleted Items folder and you are in a condition to recover it for few days. But, if you hard delete a draft or another item, it never goes to the 'Deleted Items' folder and gets removed permanently. Here is a list of hard deletion ways:

• If you use Shift + Delete key combination

• If you are using IMAP 4 (Internet Message Protocol) or POP 3 (Post Office Protocol) which usually do not send the deleted drafts/e-mails or other items to the 'Deleted Items' folder.

• Or if you delete the draft from an OST file and wipes off it from the Deleted Items folder prior syncing it to the server

Deleted Mail Recovery is possible in all the above-mentioned situations. You can recover deleted drafts by utilizing the Exchange server's retention period.

Items deleted from the 'Deleted Items' folder can be retrieved by using the 'Recover Deleted Items' option in tools menu. However, you can activate this highly useful feature on other folders as well including Drafts, Inbox, Outbox etc. It can be done by modifying Windows registry settings. Here are the steps:

• Start Registry Editor

• Locate the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options

• Click Add Value on the Edit menu. Add the following values:

Value name: DumpsterAlwaysOn

Data type: DWORD

Value data: 1

• Close Registry Editor

After you make the above-stated changes to the registry, you would become able to recover any hard deleted draft or item using the 'Recover Deleted Items' folder. However, in order to recover drafts deleted prior making changes to registry and avoid serious complications (which can erupt due to incorrectly modifying registry), you must choose a third-party deleted email recovery application.

For recovering hard deleted drafts, e-mails and other items, you can blindly rely on Stellar Phoenix Deleted Email Recovery. The application recovers deleted objects from both Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express. Moreover, this deleted mail recovery software supports Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2003, 2000 and NT4 (SP6) and restores original formatting of RTF and HTML messages.