Email Clients Tutorials
Hotmail Tutorial
Deleting and un-deleting emails with Hotmail
Windows Live Hotmail offers you the ability to read and file emails, as well as deleting them. This tutorial will explain how the email deletion process works, and how you can retrieve emails deleted by mistake; we will also tell you in which cases emails are permanently deleted without chances of recovery, so you can pay extra attention when deleting emails in these cases. This Hotmail tutorial starts by explaining the special cases in which deleted emails cannot be restored, to spare you from potentially costly mistakes.
Some emails are deleted permanently (cannot be recovered)
Important: before we show you how to delete emails in Hotmail, let us tell you about two cases in which your emails will deleted without any chance of recovery.
When an email has been deleted, it is actually moved to the Deleted folder; if the email is already in the Deleted folder, however, deleting it will remove it completely from your Hotmail account: no "second chance" recycle bin in that case.
Emails inside the Junk folder (whether Hotmail automatically placed them there, or whether you did, by marking the email as junk), are also in a grace period location - Hotmail automatically deletes emails in that folder after a certain time (and are not recoverable). When you manually delete emails (hopefully true spam) from the Junk mail folder, they do not go to the Deleted email folder - instead, they are irrecoverably deleted from your Hotmail account.
This caution advice now out of the way, the rest of this tutorial now explains the different ways you can delete emails in Windows Live Hotmail.
How to delete an email
Unlike what you might expect, Hotmail does not display a delete button above the email headers, alongside the Reply, Reply all, and Delete links. Instead, the Delete button (link) is placed at the top of Hotmail's main components (email folders, email listing, and reading pane) - as shown on this screenshot.
The Delete link will only work when one or more email messages are selected:
When an email is visible inside the reading pane, clicking Delete will delete the current email message. When you are in any folder outside Hotmail's Junk folder or Deleted folder, a deleted email can still be recovered, because Hotmail only puts it inside the Deleted folder (the special email folder that used to display a recycle bin icon in the old version of Hotmail).
Right-click or drag to delete an email
In addition to the main Delete link, which allows you to delete multiple emails (explained below), Hotmail lets you right-click on an email to display a context menu: choose Delete, and the email will be moved to the Deleted folder.
Yet another way to delete an email in Hotmail is to drag the email, and drop it above the Deleted folder, as shown on screenshot.
How to delete multiple emails at once in Hotmail
Hotmail also lets you delete multiple emails at once; this can be an especially powerful command when used with Hotmail's email search functionality (to isolate a group of emails, all of which you plan on deleting). To delete multiple emails, check the checkbox of each of the emails to delete; then, click on the Delete link at the top of the screen. All the selected emails will be moved to the Deleted folder.
This screenshot was taken from the Junk folder for illustration purposes - but here's a tip: to delete all emails from the Junk folder, just click the Empty link at the top.
Un-deleting (recovering) a deleted email
The Deleted folder works like a regular email folder in many respect. To recover an email accidentally deleted, click on Deleted to load the deleted emails folder, and locate the email you would like to recover.
While Hotmail doesn't offer a "recover email" functionality per se, that would restore the deleted email to its original location, you can still select one or more emails, and then manually click on the Move to menu, and pick the folder in which you would like to "un-delete" the selected emails.
To restore a deleted email, you can also drag it from the Deleted folder back to another email folder, Inbox or otherwise.
To restore multiple deleted emails at once, simply check each email's checkbox and then choose Move to > {Destination Folder}.