With this in mind many companies experience adds moves and changes of employees. If you are the person in charge of managing your companies email and your company uses Hosted Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes you will want to be careful deleting mailboxes. Outlook mailboxes hold much more information than just email these days. Deleting a mailbox will remove all that persons contacts, calendar, tasks and notes as well as their entire email history.

So be careful and backup that mailbox before you deleted it. I know with great certainty that hosted exchange providers have to charge a fee to recover a deleted mailbox due to the fact that it is a time consuming activity for them. For instructions on backing up your mailbox into a .pst file please click on the how to article link below.

HOWTO: Export your data from Outlook

Hope this helps and saves you some time, money & potential headaches!

Before I go into how to use this very simple feature of Exchange and Outlook let me state that each exchange server can have a different policy set-up for how long the server will keep the items you removed from your “Deleted Items” folder. Currently the servers at Link2Exchange retain them for our customers for a period of 72 hours. Other hosted exchange providers or in-house IT departments will have different policies for how long they retain those messages for you.

Now on to the fun part.. how can I get back that important email I lost when I emptied my “Deleted Items” folder?

First you need to open Outlook. Then click on you deleted items folder. Then click on the “Tools” menu and select “Recover Deleted Items” from the menu. Below is a screen shot of this step. 

The next screen that pops up will show all the items that have been deleted that you can “Recover.” You will notice that you can sort the messages by “Subject”, “Deleted On”, “From” or “Received” fields. This can make it easier to find the message you are looking for. There is also a button at the top to “Select All” the messages and a button to “Recover Selected Items.” so the next step to recover your important email is to find the email and select it then click the “Recover Selected Items” button at the top. 

Next navigate to your deleted items and look for the email you just recovered…pretty sweet huh? I bet quite a few business people have thanked the Microsoft Gods for adding that handy feature.

If you are not already an Exchange user I encourage you to give one of our Hosted Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes a try – we offer a 30 Day Free Trial.

(: Just can’t resist a little guiltless self promotion once in a while

If you had an in house Microsoft Exchange server an office move would be quite a planning task that would initiate an IT consulting bill starting in the four figure range as soon as the words “We are moving offices what is needed to move our exchange server” left your mouth.

With a hosted exchange solution an office move is so simple your team can handle it themselves and as a good friend of mine Randall Fullerton at Peritus IT Solutions says, “And you can be sitting in the Bahamas sipping a pink drink.”

Here are the Instructions below.. no need to write this down..really!

1. Get an Internet connection at the new office 
2. Shut down computers at current office and unplug
3. Bring computers to new office and plug into power and Internet
4. Turn Computers on and open Outlook
5. DONE!

Well I can imagine your head must be spinning after trying to digest all those instructions so you better order yourself another pink drink and stick with a hosted exchange solution.

PS – Thanks Randall!

Now Microsoft has partnered with service providers allowing anyone the ability to use microsoft exchange for a low per user per month fee and avoid all the upfront and ongoing maintenance costs of an in-house server which are typically thousands of dollars per year even for a small 5 person company. Hosted Exchange providers typically charge between $9.95 and $24.95 per user per month depending on the number of mailboxes your company commits to and the diskspace you require for each mailbox.

Now your business can have the email and collaboration power of Microsoft Exchange Server with no management and cost of hardware, software, back-ups or even technical support to your users. Hosted Exchange providers give you a far superior solution at a fraction of the cost.