I’d done it many times before, just not recently. But on Thursday night, I really screwed up.
My computer has Microsoft Office Suite including Outlook, which has been the means by which I access my email for years. Because I was going to be out of the office in the near future, I thought it would be a good time to look up how to access my email directly from our server.
Did I remember the password? Nope.
Found it!
My server has always fed my email straight into Outlook. If there was mail in the server site, it was about to be dumped into Outlook.
I noticed that there seemed to be quite a few emails on the server site that night. But recently, as I have checked my email on Outlook, I have had ridiculous amounts of email. Many of my attempts to unsubscribe had seemed to fail. I was getting 200+ emails/day. So I didn’t think much about it as I quickly scanned the first emails, checked “select all” and emptied the folder. I hate having a number sitting by my trash box. I have regularly emptied my email trash in Outlook – actually every day, at least once if not more. I hate having too much “stuff” sitting around my house that I don’t need. The items in my trash folder were no different. So, next, I emptied the trash on my server. Then I exited, went to my Outlook, and I was stunned. All of my inbox was GONE! EVERYTHING! Vendor price lists, warranties, and other important emails. I mean, they HAD to be important, right? After all, I had never rid of them. I very well might need to access this information some day!
I gulped, I felt flush, I panicked! These 2 accounts had never been linked before. How did this happen?!
I contacted a friend and told her about what I had done. How could I have been this stupid?!
Her response? “If you were a criminal, they would be able to recover your email. It’s on a server out there somewhere.”
She’s right!!!
The next morning I contacted our local utility company, our email server. They told me to contact Microsoft. Seriously? I’ll never get a person to explain what I did…. After many attempts and many big breaths, I reached a person. He explained how he would see what he could do by uninstalling my software and re-installing it. “This will take up to 15 minutes, you can put me on speaker phone while I work on your computer.” As soon as I heard the words “speaker phone,” I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. But, I did as he said. And after about 5 minutes, I heard a “click, buzzzzzz” on my phone. We had been disconnected! And my Office Suite including Outlook was completely gone!
I was in complete panic as I attempted to get another person at Microsoft and explain not only what I had done, but what their other employee had done. I could barely make sense. After some time, he restored my Outlook and my other programs. He explained that because I had initially made my deletions from my server, they would have to be the ones to recover any emails.
Yep, that makes sense…
I placed another call to our utility company and made contact with customer service. If I had know specifically what I had deleted, they could search for it. “I deleted everything at 9:30 p.m. Does that help?” No. As horrible as it was to lose my inbox, it would have been worse if they had been able to recover all of my email. I took a big breath, had an adult beverage with my dinner that night, and accepted the fact that these emails were gone for good.
Even as I write this, I feel my body tensing up all over again.
I had a couple of “saves.” I tend to print and file a lot of important information. I also tend to respond to many emails. My sent box was still in tact.
One girl told me yesterday, she was a little jealous of my deleted emails. She currently had thousands in her inbox. I’m glad I don’t have that, but I somehow wish I could have looked over those emails one last time before I deleted them.
Now, I am left with just trust, trusting the universe to provide for me any information that I might need.
I think it’s going to be okay….
