Need to retrieve an erased draft email from Hotmail/outlook!

March 5, 2020 1:03 PM

I accidentally overwrote a draft email in hotmail/outlook and I really need to get it back! Can I somehow get to an earlier draft or see a cached version or something?

Oh man, this is the worst. SO I've had this draft email in my hotmail/outlook for literally years. And it had some important info in it.

Today I tried to access it from my phone email app and I dont know what happened, but somehow it deleted all the text and then "saved draft" as an empty email. Now when I open up the draft, it's empty. I REALLY need that info back.

Its not in my deleted folder. There's nothing to click on that says earlier drafts etc. i checked on my phone and my work computer and I only see the empty email.

I looked online at various message boards and they all seem to say its impossible to recover an overwritten draft email. Does ANYONE have any hope for me? One thing I thought is if i went on my HOME computer and disconnected it from the internet, maybe I could access some cached version? I dont know. I'll try anything.

posted by silverstatue to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Did you ever connect your windows 10 "mail app" or a similar product (thunderbird, outlook, etc) to your mail account so that a draft copy lives on in there? If so, put your house offline (eg unplug your wifi or your network router totally), boot up your computer without internet available, and then load up the software and check if it's synchronized in one of those utilities. I suggest putting yourself completely offline because some of those apps do background synchronizations that would kick in and overwrite it before you can even get a chance to disable something in software.
posted by msbutah at 1:17 PM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

I've had this draft email in my hotmail/outlook for literally years. And it had some important info in it.

The iron law of digital information: until you can put your actual physical hands on at least two different offline storage devices, each of which contains a complete copy of the information you care about, it doesn't really exist.

I'm sorry for your loss.
posted by flabdablet at 8:08 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]