Don’t you just hate it when you delete something from your Outlook inbox, and then you delete it from your Deleted Items folder, and then you figure out two days later that you actually needed that email?

If you are on a corporate network with Exchange, and they have it enabled, you can use “Recover Deleted Items!”  — Go to the folder where you deleted the item (if it was permanently deleted from “Deleted Items,” you’ll need to go there) … Then go to Tools->Recover Deleted Items … If it’s not showing up, then likely your system administrator hasn’t enabled that feature.

You should now see a list of all the things you’ve deleted in the last 30 days, and you can individually select them and recover them by the icon on the toolbar.

What is “RecoverDeleted Items” is Greyed out and Unslectable?

All may not be lost.  Despite appearances, it may just be disabled locally, but can be re-enabled via a registry key.

If “Recover Deleted Items” is greyed out in the tools menu, there is a way to enable it, to see if it’s working on your corporate network, but this requires editing your registry.  If you don’t have any experience editing your registry, I wouldn’t recommend doing this, as it can get hairy in there, and you could cause some serious damage if deleting the wrong things.

1. Open the registry, by clicking start->run, and typing “regedit”
   and pressing ENTER.
2. Navigate to
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options.
3. Add a DWORD value named DumpsterAlwaysOn and set it to 1.
4. Restart Microsoft Outlook to make the change take effect

Now, as long as the feature is enabled in Exchange, you should have “Recover Deleted Items” lit up, and selectable.

Please comment below if this worked or didn’t work for you… or if you know of other ideas that work better.

Have fun recovering your deleted stuff!