At least three times a week I receive an email from someone asking how to recover messages that have been deleted when using a web based e-mail service. In fact almost comically these people usually have deleted that message months if not years ago and now are looking for a magic means to undelete a message on the Yahoo or Gmail servers. While I am tempted to answer these people by questioning the sanity of anyone who thinks they can recover a lost e-mail years after it was deleted on Yahoo I generally refrain from doing so and suggest that in the future if they plan on attempting to recover deleted messages they should access their email by using either Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or the newer Windows mail.
Messages sent, received and stored using Microsoft Outlook Express have a copy of that data archived on your computer’s internal hard drive. The data used for an Email message on the larger size Microsoft Outlook is stored in a text and code database known as a PST file. Software programs for Outlook Express recovery and Outlook recovery are available that will easily guide the user through the steps required to locate both Outlook Express message folders and Microsoft Outlook data within the PST file.