Recovering deleted email from a hotmail account
This question concerns recovering the previous state of a Hotmail account. Recently, a Hotmail account was commandeered and emails were deleted (and emptied from the Deleted folder). There is suspicion that the motive was to hide incriminating evidence that could lead to criminal charges. However, without the evidence, I have read that the police tend not to be so interested, even though a cybercrime has been committed (simply by unauthorized access of the account).
Microsoft is a difficult organization to navigate to have questions answered reliably.
1. What is the best way to proceed?
2. Is recovery of account emails even possible? How far back? -- 1 week? 30 days? 60 days?
Note that the account was only ever used with the Hotmail.com/outlook.com webmail interface. No email clients were involved, so there’s no hope of recovering the emails from an email client, since one was not used.
Experiences shared, recommendations, and advice are most welcome.
Thanks.
Microsoft is a difficult organization to navigate to have questions answered reliably.
1. What is the best way to proceed?
2. Is recovery of account emails even possible? How far back? -- 1 week? 30 days? 60 days?
Note that the account was only ever used with the Hotmail.com/outlook.com webmail interface. No email clients were involved, so there’s no hope of recovering the emails from an email client, since one was not used.
Experiences shared, recommendations, and advice are most welcome.
Thanks.
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ASKER
I know that large organizations have data centers and redundancy and backups for disaster recovery. My speculation is that the data exists (somewhere). I know that a finer granularity retrieval like this, is probably very difficult. But my thinking is that this can't be the first time an issue like this has arisen. I work for a small software company, and I know that it is "possible" to retrieve an inbox or calendar for a specific user, from several months ago. The sysadmins understood the reasons why going back a few months is desirable. But it's a labor intensive recovery task.
Do you think that perhaps an upgrade to "Hotmail Plus" would grant me a conversation with anyone knowledgeable at Microsoft? That is, I'd really like to get beyond the first few layers of "content-free" tech support staff. As you well know, the answer that resolves all customer support calls is: "this is not possible". The correctness of the answer is always secondary.
Thoughts?
-Scott.
Do you think that perhaps an upgrade to "Hotmail Plus" would grant me a conversation with anyone knowledgeable at Microsoft? That is, I'd really like to get beyond the first few layers of "content-free" tech support staff. As you well know, the answer that resolves all customer support calls is: "this is not possible". The correctness of the answer is always secondary.
Thoughts?
-Scott.
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ASKER
Thank you both for your input. I do appreciate it.
-Scott.
-Scott.
ASKER