Deleting emails is easy, but recovering them is more of a hassle. In Gmail, there’s an easy way to do it and a hard way. The former is almost always successful, but it only applies to mails that have been recently deleted. If, however, you’re looking to recover long-deleted emails, the method gets a whole lot more complicated. Even then, there’s no guarantee that it will work. Be that as it may, we’ll show you both ways to retrieve and recover deleted emails in Gmail.

Recovering deleted emails is a relatively simple process if they were deleted less than 30 days ago. However, if it’s been more than 30 days or if you’ve permanently deleted them manually (more on that later), you’d have to be really lucky to get back your mail. Today, we’ll look at both those scenarios to help you recover deleted emails in Gmail. However, before that, we’ll need to understand the sequence of events that happen when you delete an email from your account.

  • What Happens When You ‘Delete’ an Email?
  • Recover Deleted Gmails from Trash
  • Recover Permanently Deleted Emails
  • Other Methods to Recover Deleted Gmail Messages

What Happens When You ‘Delete’ an Email?

When you ‘delete’ an email in Gmail or other reputable webmail service providers like Yahoo and Microsoft Outlook, it’s not really deleted from your account. Instead, it’s simply moved to a ‘hidden’ folder, typically named ‘Trash’, where it stays for a stipulated period before it’s automatically deleted for good. The time-frame is typically 30 days, but some service providers allow users to change that based on their needs.

Recover Deleted Emails from Trash

  • Sign-in to your Gmail account and click/tap on the “More” option in the left pane.

  • Click/tap on the folder of your choice. The email will be restored to that folder and be safe from auto-deletion.

Recover Permanently Deleted Emails

  • To recover permanently deleted emails and auto-deleted emails in Gmail, you’ll have to use Google’s email recovery workflow. For that, log into Gmail and head over to the Gmail Message Recovery Tool page. Next, click/tap on ‘Continue’ to confirm your email ID.

If you’re using third-party email clients to access your Gmail, you might get lucky if the app was late in syncing with your account. In that case, you may be able to recover your emails from there. However, this process doesn’t seem to be working for most, so I won’t be putting my money on it.

Retrieve and Recover Deleted Gmail Messages

Recovering deleted emails is real easy if you haven’t crossed the auto-deletion window. However, it’s a whole different story if it has been a while since you’ve deleted the mail(s). While the recovery from Trash works flawlessly every time on both personal and G Suite accounts, the Gmail Recovery Tool makes it difficult in the later case. Even in personal accounts, there’s no guarantee that it will work, as you saw in my case. Either way, now that you know how to recover deleted emails in Gmail, give it a go and let us know how it went.