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Disappearing e-mail is a message sent using a type of distribution management tool for e-mail. A message sent with one of these products may disappear from the recipient's inbox, or may be still there, but altered by the sender. A user of the software can set various policies on messages that control a recipient's access to them after they are sent. For example, a user or company may stipulate a limit on how long a message will be held on the server, or whether a message can be copied, printed, forwarded, or saved. Some of the products allow a sender to retrieve messages from a recipient's inbox or to revise them, a capability that would be appreciated by a sender who had succumbed to e-mail rage or by an e-mail newsletter editor who discovered a serious error too late. According to Omniva (formerly called Disappearing Inc), their product, Policy Manager, enables the electronic equivalent of sending a message written with disappearing ink: at a certain point, the message - which contains a stored encryption key that expires when the sender stipulates - is no longer readable. There are several other products available, including Atabok's VCNMail 2.0, Authentica's MailRecall. Larger companies, including Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, are also including distribution management features in their most recent versions.
It is said that deleted files are never completely erased unless you actually do so with the proper software. Does this also refer to emails? Once I erase an email (incoming or outgoing), does that stick around somewhere also? When you “permanently” delete a file, the operating system just sets a flag or removes an entry from a list. The file’s data remains on disk until the space is overwritten by other files some time later. This can allow some files to be “un” deleted if they haven’t been overwritten. Does the same apply to email messages? It’s … complicated. When deleted emails aren’t really deletedIn most email programs and web interfaces, deleting a message doesn’t actually delete it. Instead, the message is moved to a special folder, typically called “trash” or “deleted items”. What happens next depends on the program or service. Most online services automatically delete email from trash after some amount of time — usually 30 days. This gives you a month to change your mind and recover anything you didn’t mean to delete. Desktop email programs often have a setting controlling what happens to trash, so you can decide whether it’s left alone until you explicitly empty it, or emptied automatically when you exit the program. The real question is, what happens when deleted emails are actually deleted from the trash? Emptying trash online: we just don’t knowWhen it comes to online services, we really don’t know how trash is handled. It’s hidden behind the service provider’s interface. Chances are it varies from service to service, and in fact might even change over time; they’re not obligated to tell us. The practical effect for users, though, is that once an email has been removed from an online service’s trash folder, it’s gone. There’s no getting it back, except possibly in some exceptional circumstances I’ll talk about in a moment. Emptying trash in programs: it variesDesktop email programs store email on your computer in a variety of different ways. Some use a fairly complex database in a single file (see below for an explanation); some use a less complex file for each folder; and others use your operating system’s disk structure, mapping email folders to disk folders and storing individual email messages as individual files. What happens when trash gets emptied varies a great deal. When the email program keeps individual messages as individual files, it’s pretty safe to assume they behave exactly like deleted files, because they are deleted files. It’s possible they could be undeleted. Programs using database files, like Microsoft Office Outlook’s PST files, can be much more complex. In the case of a PST, for example, when a message is deleted it’s simply marked as deleted, but not overwritten until the space it was using is needed. Deleted mail might still exist in one form or another within the database for some time. Using a “compact” operation, when the program provides it, removes the unused space so the database no longer has the message. The complication is that the compact function may copy the database to a new file and simply delete the old one. That means there may be a deleted copy of the old database that could be undeleted, still containing remnants of the deleted message. I told you it could get complicated. Don’t forget about backupsIt’s easy to overlook the impact of backing up when it comes to recovering deleted email. That exceptional circumstance I mentioned earlier is exactly that: your online email service almost certainly backs up your account. We don’t know how often or for how long, but in order to be able to recover from various types of failures, they need to have backups. The irony is that these backups are useless to you and me. They exist to protect the service, not us. If you delete an email, the service won’t retrieve it from their backups for you. However, they could get a court order to retrieve an email from their backup. This means even if you’ve completely deleted an email, the service could possibly recover it from the backups they took before you deleted it. The same is true for your own backups and your desktop email program. If you’re backing up as you should, it’s possible an email you’ve completely deleted from your desktop email program could be recovered from one of your backups. Don’t forget about the other personAnother scenario people often forget is that email, by definition, starts off with two copies: the copy in the sender’s Sent Mail folder, and the copy received by the recipient. Regardless of which you are — sender or recipient — it’s always possible the email message might be recovered from the other. Deleted emails can back to haunt you from this overlooked source.
Outlook 2016 Outlook 2013 Microsoft Outlook 2010 Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise Outlook for Office 365 Outlook 2019 More...Less When you use the Ignore feature in Microsoft Outlook 2010 or later versions, messages are automatically moved to the Deleted Items folder. When this problem occurs, a message trace indicates a DefaultFolderType:DeletedItems-Conversations Processing Agent event. Email messages that trigger this event are delivered directly to the Deleted Items folder. This problem occurs if you select Ignore on an e-mail message, and then another message from that same thread is delivered into your mailbox. When you select Ignore on an e-mail message, Outlook deletes that e-mail message and also keeps track of all future e-mail messages that are related to the ignored message. If a future message that is related to the originally ignored message arrives in your Inbox, Outlook automatically moves that future message to your Deleted Items folder. Note This feature is not available or functional in the following configuration:
To resolve this problem, remove the Ignore status of the e-mail thread. To do this, follow these steps:
At this point, the message is automatically moved from your Deleted Items folder to the folder from which the message originated. Future messages for this thread will not be automatically deleted. When you enable the Ignore option on a conversation, a message is created in the Associated Contents table of the Conversation Action Settings folder of your mailbox (The screen shot for the Conversation Action Settings folder is listed in the following screen shot.) The associated messages in the Conversation Action Settings folder use the following rules:
You can also get different behavior from this feature, depending on the version of Exchange Server that you are using:
When you Ignore a conversation, you receive the following prompt to confirm the action. In this dialog box, there is also a Don't show this message again option. If you enable this option, you will not be prompted to confirm the Ignore Conversation action the next time you select to ignore a message. If this option is enabled, the following data is written into the registry. Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\x.0\Outlook\Options\General String: PONT_STRING Value: 63 Note The <x.0> placeholder represents your version of Office (16.0 = Office 2016, Office 365 and Office 2019, 15.0 = Office 2013, 14.0 = Office 2010). Note The Pont_String value may include numbers other than 63. |