Securely deleting emails

antilles

I’m leaving my job soon and am trying to delete all my personal emails.
I have a lot of personal stuff which I don’t want people to see – could anyone recommend a secure (and free) way of permanently deleting all of my email so it can’t be recovered by anyone with reasonable technical knowledge?
We're currently using Outlook 2003 if it helps.

espresso

Surely all that you can do is delete them as any decent company would do regular backups of their server, so they will still be saved elsewhere.

JennyW_2

antilles wrote: »

I’m leaving my job soon and am trying to delete all my personal emails.
I have a lot of personal stuff which I don’t want people to see – could anyone recommend a secure (and free) way of permanently deleting all of my email so it can’t be recovered by anyone with reasonable technical knowledge?
We're currently using Outlook 2003 if it helps.

I always assumed that once you'd deleted them from DELETED ITEMS, it had gone?

S0litaire

If the company is running "Microsoft Exchange Email Server" then Deleted items are until the next full back up of the server before being removed. Their is also a setting which holds all deleted items for recovery for up to 120 days before removing them.

All you can do is hope the bosses (or IT Admin) is not nosey and take a peak at your mailbox...

antilles

Thanks folks.

I'm not too bothered about them being backed on the Exchange Server - our techies don't have access to this (we're part of a much bigger company). I'm more worried about the nosey snoopers in here recovering them from my laptop.

It's certainly possible to recover them using the Recover option in Outlook - but I've purged everything to make sure this doesn't work anymore. I guess this will stop them snooping unless they really start digging in.

isofa

JennyW wrote: »

I always assumed that once you'd deleted them from DELETED ITEMS, it had gone?

Never with computers, nothing deleted is truly deleted, unless you wipe it specifically. For files, the space is just flagged for use, but the data remains if it isn't over-written by another file.

With Outlook, if it's on a single PC, if you delete a message, it deletes it from the PST database file, although technically it'd possible to recover some data from this, it's not very likely anyone would.

On a corporate system, business network, running Outlook with an Exchange Server, the mail is stored on the server, and will be regularly backed up as espresso says.

Delete the message, will empty it from your mailbox, but there are recover tools, so you must purge all deleted items. But an IT person, could roll back to an older backup containing older messages (unlikely and why would they?).

fwor

It's a while since I used Outlook, but IIRC, there's an option to compact your local .PST file.

If you delete all of your emails and then compact your mailbag, I doubt there would be much chance of anyone retrieving old emails.

Unfortunately I can't remember exactly where the option was - I think it was quite well hidden away...

irrelevant

I think the lesson to learn here, is never use a work email address for personal use.. get a free web based mail account, or most ISPs have webmail access to your mail so you can get at your home email..

isofa

fwor wrote: »

It's a while since I used Outlook, but IIRC, there's an option to compact your local .PST file.
If you delete all of your emails and then compact your mailbag, I doubt there would be much chance of anyone retrieving old emails.
Unfortunately I can't remember exactly where the option was - I think it was quite well hidden away...

To compact your local PST (Outlook) file, right click Personal Folders (in the Folder List) within Outlook, choose Properties, then click Advanced, and finally click Compact Now.

It's worth doing this every month or so, especially if you move or delete a large amount of messages, to improve performance.