How To

If you have hard deleted (Shift-delete) a message or mail-item from a shared mailbox you may notice that the option to recover deleted items is greyed out and you cannot select it.

Hard deleted items can be restored from your deleted items folder quite easily but this option is not available in certain circumstances or for certain folders, including folders in shared mailboxes. The default deleted item retention in Office 365 is 30 days.

Recover deleted items greyed out

 

You can use the DumpsterAlwaysOn registry in order to be able recover deleted items

Setting the DumpsterAlwaysOn registry value

As stated above, if you find that the “Recover Deleted Items” option is grayed out then you need to set the DumpsterAlwaysOn Registry value.

• Key for 32-bit Outlook on a 32-bit version of WindowsHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options
• Key for 32-bit Outlook on a 64-bit version of Windows
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options
• Key for 64-bit Outlook on a 64-bit version of WindowsHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options

Create a new DWORD value with the name of DumpsterAlwaysOn and set the value to 1.

On my own system (Windows 7 64-bit with Outlook 2013) the “Options” key was not present and I had to create it first before adding the DumpsterAlwaysOn DWORD.

 

After you have made this change you need to restart Outlook for the changes to take effect and then you should see the option become available:

 

Recover Deleted Items for non-mail folders in Outlook 2010

Even though the Recover Deleted Items feature works for all non-mail folders in Outlook 2010, the feature is not available by default on the Folder tab for these type of folders. So if you have deleted a task or a calendar appointment and need to recover it, here is how to do it.

1. Go to File, then Options
2. Choose “Quick Access Toolbar”
3. Change the “Choose commands from” list to  “All Commands”
4. Select “Recover Deleted Items…” from the list
   
5. Click on the “Add > >” button.
6. Click OK.

You should then have a new option on your quick access ribbon that will enable you to recover deleted items from any folder that contains items that can be recovered.

Microsoft have some more information and a “Fix it for me” procedure on their website:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/246153/en

 

In an Office 365/Exchange environment it is possible to have many email aliases associated with your account and receive email on all of those addresses.

However sometimes it can be useful to determine which of those email addresses was used when the message is received and this information is not presented by default.

One way to achieve this is to use a transport rule on the message to modify the message in some way as to make the email address that the message was sent to easily identifiable.

Create an additional email alias to receive the mail

The first step in this process is to ensure the mailbox that you are going to be sending the message to has got an additional email address that you want to receive messages on.  I used “[email protected]”.

Once you have created the alias and ensured you can receive email on it we can create the transport rule which will enable us to identify when messages are sent to that address.

Create an Office 365 Transport Rule to modify the message subject to make it identifiable

The next step is to create a transport rule to examine the message header so that the subject is modified to make the alias that the email was sent to easy to recognize.

1. Login to your Office 365 Admin portal and go to Exchange administration.
   
2. Go into the “Mail Flow” section.
   
3. Click the add button and select the option to create a new rule.
   
4. The new transport rule window will be displayed.
   1. Give your transport rule an appropriate name
   2. Click the “more options” link at the bottom of the window.
   3. Under the “Apply this rule if…” option, select “A message header…” and then “Matches these text patterns”
      
   4. Click on the “Enter text…” link and and enter the word “to” (without brackets) in the specify header name field and click OK.
      
   5. Click on “Enter text patterns…” and enter the email address for the messages that you are trying to identify and click the plus symbol to add it, then click “ok”.
      
   6. From the “Do the following” menu option choose “Prepend the subject of the message with…”
      
   7. Enter the text that you would like prepend to the message subject line. e.g.
      
   8. Add any additional conditions that you would like to apply and then click “ok”.
5. Save the transport rule.
6. Send an email to the address that you are trying to identify and you should see that the subject line has been amended to reflect your newly created rule.

You may find that when you send an email to the specified address immediately after creating the rule that it is not applied. I found that I had to wait for a few minutes before it started working.