Deleted email recovery

Question

I have lost an email that was sent on 8 March 2026 and landed in junk mail. It has been auto deleted after the retention period. I know the sender address. Is there any way to recover the email from backups, if so how can this be requested?

Answer 1

Hi Louise Bickerton

Emails in the Junk Email folder are automatically deleted after the retention period. As the email was received on 8 March 2026 and is no longer available under Recover items deleted from this folder, it has been permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.

Unfortunately, we are unable to request a backup restoration for an individual email in this situation.

Please note that this is a user-to-user support forum. Moderators, contributors including external Microsoft employees cannot directly intervene in Microsoft product features or access back-end systems. Our role is limited to providing technical guidance on reported issues, requests, or ideas only.

Please contact the original sender and ask them to resend the email, including any attachments.

To prevent future messages from this sender from being moved to Junk Email, please add the sender’s address to your Safe Senders list after receiving the new message.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further updates, thanks.

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Yes". If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".   

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.