It depends on whoâs looking.
Emptying the trash is a good approach to making sure messages youâve deleted stay that way.
But.
Naturally, there is an exception you need to be aware of.
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For the average email user, email in a trash folder or recycle bin is quickly recoverable. Once those folders are emptied the email is gone for good. However, the provider could be required to turn over email stored in their backups to law enforcement if there is sufficient cause. How long those backups are kept, or even what they contain, is unknown and probably varies from provider to provider.
Trashing your email: gone for good
If you click Empty Trash or Empty Recycle Bin, you wonât be able to recover any messages that used to be in there. Gone is gone.
The good news here is, the same is true for a hacker. Not only would they not be able to recover the former contents of your trash, but they wouldnât have any indication there was anything there to begin with.
Many desktop-based email programs offer the option of automatically emptying the trash when you close the program. While this is mostly an effort to save disk space, it also makes recovery of those messages harder.
Web-based email services like Yahoo!, Gmail, Outlook.com, and others typically leave messages in your trash or recycle bin for only so long â like 30 days â before deleting them permanently. Iâm not aware of any automated immediate âempty the trash on exitâ functions for web email, though, so youâll need to do that manually if itâs what you want.
Is it really gone for good?
Remember that email providers â in your case, Yahoo! and Gmail â back up their servers.
While you and I wouldnât be able to access the email that used to be in our trash, itâs possible someone at the email provider could. For example, they might be able to access it from a backup taken before you deleted it, or other resources they maintain that we simply donât know about.
Generally, this isnât a huge risk when we consider hacking. It would take a rogue employee, or someone actually hacking into the data center and then knowing where to look, to find those backups. I consider this malicious scenario extremely unlikely.
But thereâs another scenario people often donât think about.
The long arm of the law
Letâs say an email may be of interest to law enforcement or the legal system. In fact, letâs say itâs an email you deleted and then emptied your trash, so even you wouldnât be able to recover it.
Email providers are often compelled by court orders to retrieve data.
We donât know how often â they donât publicize the requests â and we donât know if those requests include digging into backups. We donât even know how long email providers keeps backups.
But the point is, in theory, an email provider could be compelled to recover messages you had removed from your trash.
To be clear, itâs not something they do lightly. If you asked them to recover one lost message, theyâre more likely to tell you âtough luckâ and that the data is gone forever.
But if what youâre concerned about has legal, political, or other ramifications, it is conceivable they could recover a deleted email message.
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I donât like people frantically deleting everything they even think they donât need anymore, because you never know when you want to look at it one more time. I donât say you canât delete email, just that since that deletion is permanent for all intents and purposes, you should be careful with it. Especially Gmail these days has ample space, so thereâs really no need to delete anything in my opinion. Iâm not familiar with Yahoo, but I imagine they too will give you space for quite a few messages.
So just be careful, and use labels or folders to stow away messages you donât want cluttering your inbox, rather than just destroying everything. Unless of course you have something to hide, but then maybe you should just use a longer password, or get your own domain and mail server that you control (sort of: if you rent it from some hosting company, they will still be backing it up).
AND if you did have your own Domain and Mail Server, would you NOT follow âGood Practiceâ and back it up?
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I suggest that one would expect ISPs to retain Back-ups including âdeletedâ files etc, for the minimum required in their âhomeâ legal regime.
For example, in Scotland, physical Receipts for Paid Bills should be retained for at least 5 years, to provide proof of that payment. For some items it is 6 years.
In England & Wales, it is 6 years.
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Technically, does âdeletionâ on such servers follow the same or similar pattern to PC HDDs, where a â$â sign is added to the file name, to indicate it may be over-written when disk space is required, rather than âeradicationâ of one sort or another?
23-Apr-2013
May seem a silly question but where can one get full but easy to understand basic instructions on how to back-up. Lacking this knowledge is possibly the reason why many people, as you have remarked elswhere on your website, do not back-up?
10-May-2013
@ Noggin,
Ask and you shall receive. Here is a link to Leoâs step by step backup articles.
How to Backup
Hi leo
What about the person you sent the original email to? They probably still have a copy ( even if you canât access it)
Yes. Leo mentioned that in an article he linked to in the Related Posts
Are Deleted Emails Really Deleted?
Of course.
âwe donât know if those requests include digging into backups.â
We may not know for sure, but Iâm certain they look into backups. Otherwise, theyâd be missing a ship load of evidence.
âWe donât even know how long email providers keeps backups.â I donât know about email providers but when I worked for Texas Instruments, they kept backups for at least 7 years (the statute of limitations for tax audits). I wouldnât be surprised if they held stuff for a few years. In this case assuming the worst is possible is the safest.
Hi Leo,
I use Outlook for my e-mail. Just to illustrate that âdeletedâ doesnât mean gone for good, there is an option in Outlook to recover deleted e-mail messages, even after emptying the Trash folder. Iâve done it a few times just to see what happens. It was a surprise to see just how many messages came up in the list, going well past 30 days. Again, proof that the Internet doesnât forget.
Question: If you use a desktop email program like Mozillaâs Thunderbird and you set the account settings to NOT leave messages on your ISPâs server (Comcast, for example), does that mean Comcast no longer has your messages and they exist only on your own desktop computer?
Thanks for any insights.
The messages are removed from your folders on Comcasts severs, but they may still exist in their backups, for example.
âGone is definitely NOT goneâ after deleting mail from Thunderbirdâs inbox.
Check it yourself. Just open the INBOX file with your favorite editor.
The File => Compress Folders (or right-click on ) should do the trick.
That is why Iâve also moved these files to encrypted partition.
if my emails are indeed gone when i empty the trash, and the
law wants to go looking through them and my provider grants
it to them, i believe the courts would call that a fishing expedition.
it would not be admissible in court. so what would be the point to ask?
unless the law wanted to find somewhere to look for evidence. but then,
again, it would be fishing.
Iâm not a lawyer, so this is just my opinion, but I would say thatâs bad legal advice. If the judge believes there is probable cause, it would be legal in most cases.
It actually gets way more complicated and ambiguous, since you (and I to some degree) are assuming US or similar law. There are plenty of countries or jurisdictions where âprobable causeâ isnât a thing. âBecause I said soâ is sometimes enough.
I am not a lawyer, and what youâre postulating is a legal question â however it doesnât have to be fishing. âWe have reason to believe that a message containing âXââŠâ might well be enough for a targeted retrieval. And for that matter, fishing expeditions arenât necessarily always illegal, just time consuming and costly.
Excellent article, Leo, for which many thanks.
Iâve been using Microsoft Outlook since it became available back in the 90s. Subsequent versions have improved tremendously and search capability is such that I rarely delete anything, especially now that space is no longer a problem. Iâve been greatly relieved and delighted over the years when Iâve searched for and found an e-mail received decades ago. The good thing about Outlook is that it automatically empties the deleted items folder whenever I exit the program.