How to Rescue Your Old "Deleted" Email Messages from Imminent Destruction

posted Jan 14, 2010, 2:27 PM by Unknown user
How to Rescue Your Old "Delet...
How to Rescue Your Old "Deleted" Email Messages from Imminent Destruction
by Ken Clipperton
December 29, 2009
(Updated January 14, 2010)

As part of the migration to WarriorMail (Gmail), I learned that some of us have been using the "Deleted" mail folder as a permanent archive. Well, Google treats deleted mail the same way almost everyone else in the world does -- by permanently removing messages from their servers 30 days after they are deleted. We migrated your "Deleted" mail for you, but unless you act those messages will all be gone 30 days from your email migration date. If you want to keep your old MLC "Deleted" messages permanently then follow the steps described below before January 15, 2010. I created a video that walks through these steps, but I didn't have a decent microphone so the audio is very poor. The video is available on the Downloadable Files page of the WarriorWeb launch site. I think the text below is clear enough to follow, but you may wish to print the steps out and then watch the video to get comfortable with the process before you follow the steps yourself. If you get stuck, feel free to contact the IT Help Desk at MLC for assistance.

Steps to Rescue Your Old "Deleted" Email Messages from Destruction
  1. Log into your email at WarriorMail@mlc.edu
  2. Create a label called "Old Deleted". (As suggested above, watch the video on the "Downloaded Files" page if you don't know how to create a label.)
  3. At least temporarily show the "All Mail" and "Trash" labels.
    • Click on "Labels", "Manage Labels".
    • Click on "show" next to the "All Mail" and "Trash" labels.
  4. Go to "Trash" by clicking on the Trash label.
  5. Select all trash by clicking on "All" in "Select: All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, Unstarred" just above the list of messages.
    At the top of the list of messages you will see a line of text that says, "All (some number) conversations on this page are selected. Select all 999 conversations in Trash"
  6. Click on the link to "Select all 999 (however many) conversations in Trash"
  7. Click on "Move to" and select "Old Deleted" from the list of labels.
  8. Verify that this process worked by clicking on the "Old Deleted" and "Trash" labels on the left side of the screen. You should see all the messages in "Old Deleted" and none in "Trash".
** You should keep in mind that from now on, Google after 30 days they will permanently purge any email message that you have deleted. If you want to keep permanent access to a message, archive it or move it to a label/folder instead of deleting it. **

The next steps are optional and only necessary if you want to eliminate the "Old Deleted" label and have these messages in Gmail's normal "All Mail" permanent archive.
  1. Click on "Old Deleted" to see all the messages with that label.
  2. Select all by clicking on "All" in "Select: All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, Unstarred" just above the list of messages.
  3. At the top of the list of messages you will see a line of text that says, "All 25 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 999 conversations in Old Deleted"
  4. Click on the link to "Select all 999 (however many) conversations in Old Deleted"
  5. Click on "More Actions" and choose "Archive". This will move these messages into the "All Mail" archive.
  6. You can then eliminate the "Old Deleted" label by clicking on "Labels", "Manage Labels" and then clicking on "Remove" option next to the "Old Deleted" label.

I hope you found this article helpful. Please contact MLC's IT Help Desk if you need assistance.

The contents of this post are also available as a separate web page at http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfk9q79b_18fw56b8g9.

NOTE: If the worst case happens and Google purges the "deleted" messages that were migrated from MLC's Exchange server, you still have access to those messages on the old Exchange server at least for a while. Contact the IT Help Desk and we will work on a resolution. It might be as simple as re-migrating the deleted messages to Google or archiving them from the old server and accessing them via Outlook's archive function.

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