Help! I need to un-delete!!!

M

Michelle

Last night I cleaned up my email - emptied my spam folder
into my deleted items folder and then emptied the folder.
I only do this about once every 6 months because I'm
paranoid about deleting something by mistake...

And I was proven right.

I deleted an important message that evidently got into
the spam folder by mistake. It was the last thing I did
before I went to bed last night so nothing has been used
since.

Is there any way to recover the messages?

Thanks!!!!

Michelle
 
B

Barry Wainwright

Last night I cleaned up my email - emptied my spam folder
into my deleted items folder and then emptied the folder.
I only do this about once every 6 months because I'm
paranoid about deleting something by mistake...

And I was proven right.

I deleted an important message that evidently got into
the spam folder by mistake. It was the last thing I did
before I went to bed last night so nothing has been used
since.

Is there any way to recover the messages?

Thanks!!!!

Michelle
Click to expand...

Oh dear.

No direct way, but there is a (slight) hope still open to you.

The space in the database created when you delete items is not automatically
overwritten or recovered. It gets overwritten with new stuff that arrives,
so the first step is to turn off notifications, quit entourage and duplicate
the database before you lose any more stuff.

Then, the only way to see the mail in there that has been deleted is to open
the database in a text editor (the free version of BBEdit will do fine),
search for words or phrases you know to be in the delete items you want to
recover and see if any of the message text is still available. There will be
all sorts of binary garbage in there as well, but some text *may* be
recoverable.

Alternatively, you've always got a recent back-up, haven't you? ;-)
 
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