Microsoft® Outlook 2003 - Recover Deleted Items

Applies to: Microsoft® Outlook 2003

Let's pretend that you have an e-mail account on an Microsoft® Exchange, and also pretend that you access your e-mail using Microsoft® Outlook 2003.  Imagine that you have deleted some e-mail and you no longer see it within Outlook.  There is a way to recover your deleted e-mails from any folder within your exchange account.  Keep in mind this only works if you are using Outlook 2003, and you have an exchange account.  This will involve modifying the Windows registry.

Follow these simple instructions:

1. Make sure that Outlook is closed.
2. Open Windows® registry editor
3. Navigate to:
4. \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options
5. Right-click in the right pane, and select New, then DWORD Value.
6. The name for the new DWORD Value is DumpsterAlwaysOn.  (There are no spaces)
7. Double-click on DumpsterAlwaysOn and change the value to 1.
8. Close the registry editor.  Open Outlook.

To recover an e-mail, select the folder where the e-mail was located, then go to the Tools menu, and then select Recover Deleted Items.  The resulting window will show you a list of e-mails which were deleted from the currently selected folder.