Deleted mail in trash can

NewZealand85

New Email
Hi.

By a mistake I sent some sensitive information to a contact of mine. I contacted the guy and meet up with him to make sure that he deleted the mail. I watched him delted the mail from his inbox and from his trashcan, can the guy still get the mail back then? He was using a hotmail account and was using his cell phone. Not sure what browser he used sorry. The mail was sent from a gmail account with a firefox browser. The mail is also delted from from my mail (both sent mail and trash can).

Thanks in advance.
 

milojstangelo

New Email
Hi.

By a mistake I sent some sensitive information to a contact of mine. I contacted the guy and meet up with him to make sure that he deleted the mail. I watched him delted the mail from his inbox and from his trashcan, can the guy still get the mail back then? He was using a hotmail account and was using his cell phone. Not sure what browser he used sorry. The mail was sent from a gmail account with a firefox browser. The mail is also delted from from my mail (both sent mail and trash can).

Thanks in advance.
You have done all you possibly can in this matter. It is rather doubtful if the email can be retrieved. Let it go and move on.

MJS
 

foggy

Valued Member
There's no way to reclaim the message in your Gmail account, AFAIK, so your account is safe. But Hotmail does have a deleted message recovery option. So if your contact knows about that feature, he could use it to get the message back. But I'm not sure what kind of a time frame is involved. Maybe the deleted messages are no longer recoverable after a week or month ?

Since you say you "watched" him delete the message, I take it you know him well enough to see him face-to-face easily. ?? My suggestion would be to see him again, have him go into his Hotmail account and check on the deleted folder page, I believe, for a link to restore messages. If the email with the sensitive information comes back, then I'd probably do the following (though I can't be sure this would work; it's a guess):

1. Leave the newly recovered email in whatever folder it shows up in (deleted messages ? inbox ?).
2. Go into his settings and change it to not allow recovery of messages.
3. Log out of Hotmail. Log back in.
4. Go to the message you recovered.
5. Delete it again and empty the deleted items folder.
6. Log out Hotmail. Log back in.
7. Go to Settings and re-activate the option to restore deleted messages.
8. Go to the deleted message folder and click the link to restore messages and see if the message comes back once again. If not, you can be fairly confident it's gone and he will only be able to recover messages from then on. If it does come back, you'll have to contact someone at the official Hotmail forums to ask how to make sure that message can be really unrecoverable.
 

NewZealand85

New Email
foggy;10672 1. Leave the newly recovered email in whatever folder it shows up in (deleted messages ? inbox ?). 2. Go into his settings and change it to [I said:
not [/I]allow recovery of messages.
3. Log out of Hotmail. Log back in.
4. Go to the message you recovered.
5. Delete it again and empty the deleted items folder.
6. Log out Hotmail. Log back in.
7. Go to Settings and re-activate the option to restore deleted messages.
8. Go to the deleted message folder and click the link to restore messages and see if the message comes back once again. If not, you can be fairly confident it's gone and he will only be able to recover messages from then on. If it does come back, you'll have to contact someone at the official Hotmail forums to ask how to make sure that message can be really unrecoverable.

Step nr 1 that you suggested is not possible because the mail is already deleted, so I guess that I should just do step 1 then? I will contact the guy tomorrow and have it done.

What if he did reclaim it he then could have downloaded it (its a 700 pages document btw) to his computer/cell phone and then deleted it from the mail. How can I check wether it is in his computer or cell phone/check wether he has downloaded it or not? I never see him at school with a laptop. He's either on his cell phone or at the school computers.

Thanks
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hi NewZealand85,

I agree that you have made a best effort in trying to get the email deleted.

An additional alternative to be aware of is that the person could have forwarded / saved / loaded the email on the cell phone or another device before you watched them delete it.

This is a good lesson in double checking your screen before pushing the send button.

:welcome: to Email Questions!
 

foggy

Valued Member
Step nr 1 that you suggested is not possible because the mail is already deleted, so I guess that I should just do step 1 then? I will contact the guy tomorrow and have it done.

Hi,

Sorry, that sounds a little confusing to me. :confused:

Anyway, yes, I realize the message is "already deleted," but since you were asking about whether it could be recovered or not, I was suggesting a course of action to determine that. By going to see the guy and watching him access his Hotmail account, you'd be able to see (at the bottom of the deleted items folder) whether there is a link allowing him to reclaim deleted/emptied messages. By then clicking that link he & you would see whether the message that you want gone-for-good has been restored to his account or not (either in the inbox or the trash folder).

If -- repeat: IF -- that process does, in fact, recover the message you want permanently gone, that's when I would go through the steps I mentioned. (As noted, it's only a suggestion to go through those steps to see if, after all that, your message is finally permanently deleted and unrecoverable by the guy via his Hotmail account.)

Anyway, let us know what you try and what happens ! :)
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
One more sneaky thing I thought of is that the person could have taken screen shots of the information so that it could be hidden somewhere else while their devices and email programs were being checked by you.
 
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