Help - used clean-up on my inbox, now most emails are gone

Glad the email restored itself 😉

Hi AnnaThomas and thank you so much for trying to help. First the good news ... the mail gradually 'restored' itself after a period of time. My assumption was that this whole thing was due to client server sync issues, but I have nothing deeper than this hunch.

After posting on the community, I went to the mail server via Horde WebMail to confirm things were OK there, which they were. I also got rid of a bunch of mail with huge attachments [I was reaching my mail file quota]. When I got back to my Windows Desktop, Outlook was sync'ing my InBox, and adding 'deleted' files as it continued. The Tidy-Up folder still contains 1 item, though, yet on the server copy of my folders there were many more items. Much as I'd love to explain this difference, I'm just happy to have email history back - though it is a wake-up call for me to do some archiving :)

To answer your specific suggestions :

> I hadn't restarted Outlook, but there was nothing for Undo to do [it was grayed out]

> I'd already looked at the Deleted Items option, but on Outlook 2016, this is 'Trash', and there wasn't a Recoverable Items option. Using the web version of Outlook showed Deleted Items, but this was empty and said there were no recoverable items

> By chance I did have an old ost file, 11 months old, but thankfully it seems I dont need after all - phew - but from now on I'll be sure to schedule regular backups

Once again, I really appreciate you taking the time to help out.

Hi Andy

I'm AnnaThomas and I'd happily help you with your question. In this Forum, we are Microsoft consumers just like yourself no one here is a Microsoft employee.

The Clean-up utility in Outlook is designed to delete redundant messages in a conversation and move them to a specified folder. However, it may also delete messages that are not completely contained in a later reply, such as messages with attachments or different subject lines. This may explain why you only found one email in your Clean-up folder and why your inbox was reduced so drastically.

To undo the action of the Clean-up utility, you can try the following steps:

If you have not closed Outlook yet, you can use the Undo command to restore the deleted messages. To do that, press Ctrl+Z on your keyboard or click Undo on the Quick Access Toolbar. You can press Undo repeatedly if you want to undo multiple steps.

If you have closed Outlook or the Undo command does not work, you can try to recover the deleted messages from the server. To do that, go to your Deleted Items folder and click Recover items deleted from this folder on the Home tab. A dialog box will appear with a list of items that can be recovered. Select the messages that you want to restore and click OK.

If you cannot find the deleted messages in the Recoverable Items folder, you can try to restore them from a backup file if you have one. To do that, go to File > Open & Export > Open Outlook Data File and browse for the backup file (usually with a .pst or .ost extension). A new folder will appear in your Outlook with the name of the backup file. You can drag and drop the messages that you want to restore from the backup folder to your inbox.

Learn more: https://support.microsoft.com/office/7394c2cc-4dd2-445e-89e8-3b57d5b7326a

I hope this helps ;-), let me know if this is contrary to what you need, I would still be helpful to answer more of your questions.

Best Regards,

AnnaThomas

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