How to permanently restore emails from Gmail

Gmail is one of the most popular email services and is used by over a billion people worldwide. The Gmail client offers several cool features to manage your email and easily organize it. “Trash” in Gmail is foolproof, as it stores deleted emails for 30 days (or until you permanently delete them yourself, whichever comes first). But sporadically, one might run into a problem where you accidentally deleted an email and can't seem to find it. Of course, the first place to look, in such a situation, is the trash, and if that doesn't work … well, you still have a couple of things you can try. So, if you want to recover deleted Gmail messages, here are some things you can try:

Recover deleted Gmail emails: Report problem to Google

If you've permanently deleted some of your emails, without pausing in case you might need them later, then you're pretty unlucky. There is no way in the Gmail interface to even attempt to recover deleted emails. The good news, though, is that you can report your issue to Google, and they may be able to restore your emails for you.

To report a issue to Google, simply send a report to Google, with all the information you have, and they will try to help you.

You must provide an email address where Google representatives can contact you, along with additional information, including the date you first noticed the missing emails, as well as a description of your problem (along with some steps to reproduce your problem).

Note! This service is intended for users who have lost their data due to unauthorized access to their accounts. Therefore, Google may decide not to help you if you deleted the emails yourself. However, in some cases you can get Google to help you, even if yours is not the case of unauthorized access to a Gmail account.

2. Recover deleted Gmail emails: G Suite users

If you are a G Suite user, and you have accidentally deleted some of your emails, not only from your inbox, but also from the trash, not everything is gone. If you are the administrator of the G Suite accounts, you can recover deleted Gmail messages for a single user (or up to 10 users) by going to the admin console.

Note! Even as an administrator, you can only restore data that was deleted in the last 25 days. Any data deleted more than 25 days ago cannot be recovered.

If you want to recover a G Suite user's deleted data, these are the steps you need to follow:

Sign in to your G Suite admin account and go to the admin console. Click here on “Users”, to display all users in your organization.

In the list of users, click the user you would like to restore data to.

Then, on the user's side, click on the icon of three dots on the top right and click on” Restore data “.

You will see a modal, asking you about the date and the service. Fill in the date range for which you want to restore data and select “Gmail” as the service. Note that you cannot use dates further than 25 days back. Leaving these fields blank will return an error. When done, click on" Restore data ".

Any other ways to recover deleted Gmail messages?

If you use third-party clients to access your Gmail emails using IMAP or POP3, there is a chance that the emails you deleted from Gmail were not synced with your client, so you may be able to recover your emails from there. But this method didn't work for me, so take it with a grain of salt.

There are also a number of third-party (and usually shady) apps and tools that claim to recover your deleted emails, but they never work, and allowing such tools to access your Gmail account is generally not advisable due to privacy and safety concerns. As a rule of thumb, you should never trust such third-party tools with your Google Account credentials or allow them to access any part of your ID.

Recover deleted Gmail emails using these methods

Recovering deleted Gmail emails is not an easy task, and doesn't work all the time. Of course, if you're a G Suite user, you can recover your emails (within 25 days of deleting them). But for personal accounts, the report-to-Google method is likely your best bet. In general, you shouldn't delete emails unless you're sure you don't need them again. Instead, you can archive emails you don't need anymore, so you can get them if you need them later.

So, have you ever permanently deleted an email that you ended up needing later? How did you get it back? Please let us know about your experience in recovering deleted Gmail messages in the comment section below.