Access 'permanently deleted' Outlook items
Finally, in this series about the ‘not so permanently’ deleted Outlook items, how do you recover a supposedly ‘permanently’ deleted item?
Or maybe check to see if something you want wiped from your computer has truly been removed.
All this is embarrassingly easy (embarrassing to Microsoft). There are various tools on the Internet that will open an Outlook data file and let you peek inside.
We’ve used these tools. There’s separate software for the two different types of data files PST and OST.
Close down Outlook before using one of the tools to open the data file. Outlook data files can be very large so choose the ‘Quick’ option unless you are dealing with a corrupted data file.
Then search for the items you’re interested in.
These are viewing tools so there is no way to directly recover a ‘permanently’ deleted item (i.e. change the ‘Deleted’ flag to ‘No’).
You can export to a separate file. Right-click and select Export. In the free version this only gives you a save to PDF file.
Alternatively, copy/paste the items details from the preview window. In particular the Normal Mail, Message Header and HTML views.
