How do I recover email that I deleted six months ago?

Planning Ahead

The only nearly certain way to always be able to retrieve email that you've deleted in the past is to back it up regularly, and save all the backups forever.

Typically, that means that you're downloading your email to your own computer, and you take periodic backups of some sort.

That way, retrieving an accidentally deleted email - or anything else for that matter - is as simple as extracting it from that backup.

Yet another reason that backups can be so incredibly valuable.

(The "nearly" case that's not covered is email that you receive and then delete prior to a backup being taken.)

Throw Money or Lawyers At It

So, here's a theory: a good email service provider backs up data on their server, and they probably keep it for "a while".

So, perhaps, your email service provider has a backup that was created while the email was on their servers, and perhaps your deleted email is in one of those backups.

Good luck finding out if it exists, and even then good luck getting the email service provider to take the (probably substantial) time to dig it out and recover it for you.

That's where lawyers and money come in.

As I said, recovering something from a months-old backup for a customer is going to be a LOT of work. If they have the backup, and if they let you know they have the backup then maybe they'll recover it for a fee.

Alternatively, if you're faced with a legal issue, then it's possible that maybe a lawyer could finagle a court order of some sort to recover the data - if the matter is sufficiently serious, and the data exists.

And as always, you'd have to find a way to get the email provider's attention to even respond to your requests. Good luck with that.

Me, I wouldn't count on all those if's and maybe's.

The very legal issues that you might be facing are often a reason that corporations, and perhaps ISPs, have a formal "retention policy" that explicitly states that backups, and email in particular, is destroyed after a certain amount of time.

The Assumption You Really Should Make

The only safe assumption you can make is that unless you've set up your own system to backup or otherwise retain things, email deleted months ago cannot be recovered.

Since you're asking the question I'm going to assume you've not set anything up in advance, and thus the answer to your question is probably very simple.

I know of no way to retrieve the emails you deleted months ago.