Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

I've been getting some spam on my blogs alias through Exchange despite the fact that I obfuscate the address on the site and despite the fact I've got the Exchange Intelligent Message Filtering turned on pretty high. So every so often I go into the Blogs folder in Outlook and hold SHIFT+DEL to get rid of that bloody email that's trying to sell me 0EM copies of Office and W1ndows. This last time I accidentally thought the email was highlighted but instead I got ahead of myself on Remote Desktop and the entire Blogs folder was deleted.

I thought I was out of luck but swore I remembered that Exchange had a way to come to my rescue. I thought it might be through the Mailbox Recovery Center but oh no. There's an even more elegant solution. With Outlook 2003 closed do the following:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedt32, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options
   Right-click the Options subkey, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
3. Type DumpsterAlwaysOn for the DWORD name, and then press ENTER.
4. Double-click DumpsterAlwaysOn.
5. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
6. Quit the Registry Editor and start Outlook again. You should now have Recover Deleted Items under the expanded Tools menu.

It should be noted that this works specifically with Exchange when an email rentention policy has been set up. I've just gone and changed my server to not permanently delete email from the message store for 14 days instead of the default of 7. Here's a link to one of the KB articles I've found with a little more information and another via Office Online. For more information on how to configure Exchange to match your ideal storage limits see this KB article.

After doing a couple quick searches via MSN and Google it appears I'm actually rather late with coming up with this information. But it's nice to learn littles bits and pieces like this when you make mistakes .