Recovering "hard" deleted email items

You are running Exchange 2003 in your organization. You have deleted item retention set up. Your users are trained that they can click on the the Tools\Recover Deleted Items menu item in Outlook and get stuff back that they deleted on accident. But wait...you get a call that there are no items in that list. What gives? Turns out the user hard deleted the items (used SHIFT+DELETE) when clearing them out. In this case, the Recovery window is empty. Not to fret, there are a couple of workarounds.

1) Use OWA to recover the deleted items. You must go to a special URL which contains the command to show those deleted items:
https://server_name/exchange/user_name/inbox/?cmd=showdeleted
Substitute your user, server, and folder information as required.

2) Set a registry key on your system containing the Outlook client
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/178630 details how to do the following

  • Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options

  • Right-click the Options subkey, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
    Type DumpsterAlwaysOn for the DWORD name, and then press ENTER.

  • Double-click DumpsterAlwaysOn.
    In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.

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