How To Recover Deleted Emails In Gmail

Some of us receive hundreds of emails everyday and a good way to manage your emails would be to use features like labels that can help organize emails. An alternative would also be to delete emails that you no longer need, but sometimes during the process, you might accidentally delete an email you did not mean to.

Thankfully, for the most part, this is not the end of the world, especially if you use Gmail. If you need help in recovering a deleted email in Gmail, then read on to find out how you can go about doing that.

Recover Deleted Emails In Gmail

The good thing about Gmail is that it offers users several different ways of recovering deleted emails. Google seems to recognize that sometimes users don’t necessarily intend to delete their emails and have introduced several methods of recovering them. This includes undoing a delete action and restoring it from your trash, and last but not least, reach out to Google in hopes that they can help.

Undo A Deleted Email

Whenever you delete an email in Gmail, you will see a small notification appear at the bottom left corner of Gmail in which it says “Conversation moved to Trash” with a button that says “Undo”. Click on “Undo” and it will move the email back to your inbox or whichever folder it was originally stored in.

Note that this Undo feature only lasts a few seconds so you will need to move quickly to recover it and undo your action. If you missed the window, don’t worry and just move on to the steps below.

Restoring Deleted Emails From Trash

Google typically stores deleted emails in the Trash folder for 30 days from the time it was deleted. This means that you will have basically a month to go and recover it and restore it back to your inbox.

1. Click on Trash located at the sidebar to the left of Gmail
2. Look for the email you want to restore
3. Right-click the email and select “Move to inbox” (you can also select multiple emails at once if you want to restore in bulk)
4. The email should now be restored back in your Gmail’s inbox

Ask Google For Help

What if you deleted an email and it’s been more than 30 days? This means that it should have already been “permanently” deleted from your Trash folder. If that has happened, then there is nothing that can be done, at least not on your end. For those with G Suite accounts, you can actually reach out to your IT admins who actually have an additional 25 days to recover a permanently deleted email.

For those with regular Google and Gmail accounts, there exists a last-resort method to recover your deleted email, and that is to ask Google for help. Google has a “missing email”  recovery form that you can fill up here.

There is no guarantee that Google will entertain your request as it seems to be more for instances where your email might have been hacked and someone else deleted the contents, but like we said, it is a last-measure resort that could worth trying if all else fails.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: GMail, Google