Good Question: What Happens When You Delete An Email?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) - Hillary Clinton has spent the past week under scrutiny for using a personal email account while she was the U.S. Secretary of State. On Tuesday, she told reporters that she handed over about 30,000 work-related emails, but "chose not to keep" another 30,000 personal emails.
"No one wants their personal emails made public," Clinton said.
So, we thought we'd answer a Good Question from Janice in Minneapolis: What happens when you delete an email?
"Think of it like a library book on the shelf," said Nate Dittmar, a computer forensic investigator with Computer Forensic Services. "When you get rid of an email, you're not getting rid of the book, you're getting rid of the card catalog entry."
He says when we delete emails, and then empty our deleted items folder, we are telling the computer to forget that email is there. He says those emails, though, can continue to reside hidden in our inboxes or computers for the short term.
Deleted emails also remain intact on email providers' servers. In fact, Yahoo will even try to help people recover deleted emails, if they've been deleted within the past seven days.
Dittmar says each provider has different retention policies and timelines for deleted emails. Some can be as short as 30 days, while others can last longer than a year.
"It would take a lot of resources to keep every email that every person has ever had," he said. "There's a lot of spam that people don't want to hang onto."
After the retention period has passed, providers say they purge old emails from their severs. Dittmar says the purge deletes emails from a provider's archives, but there might still be ways to retrieve them.
"If it's an email you have access to on your computer, it's entirely possible there's still an artifact or remnant of that email sitting on your computer or your mobile device," he said.
And, that's when a computer forensic investigator can use their specialized training, knowledge and tools to attempt to piece an email back together.
"There are times when you can delete an email and it can be gone forever," he said. "There are also times that you can recover emails that have been deleted years and years ago."
