Stop Using Your Deleted Items as Another Storage Folder For Email!

This is pretty much a rant post. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I am in the process of restoring mailboxes from our oldest email backups for an upcoming court case. So I have been busily working on this project for the last few days, and now I am restoring mailboxes. Half of the people I am restoring have gobs and gobs of email in their deleted items folder. WHY!?!?!?


Isn't the purpose for having a deleted items folder is to have a place to put junk you don't want any more? Sure, I can see keeping stuff in there for a few weeks in case you have to restore an email you deleted, but after that...Dude, time to clean it out!

This one particular mailbox I am restoring right now has over 4000 emails in it! Now keep in mind, this is before my company had mailbox limits, and policies to clean out deleted items after a while. Now if you want to keep it, the last place you want to put it is your deleted items because we will clean that for you. Back when this backup was done, we didn't have such policies in place, so cleaning your mailbox and deleted items was on the honor system. That is great unless you are a pack rat (like company lawyers tend to be).

Anyhoo, this was pretty much just a rant. Don't use your deleted items for storage, and you and I will get along splendidly.

Posted in: deleted items, email, outlook, storage