Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: paul.fr on 08/03/2008 07:36:37
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I only use outlook at work, so i can't try this at home. Being too impatient to wait until i go to work, i will ask the question:
Can you disable the delete email feature in microsoft outlook? Thus no emails received or sent can be deleted?
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Which Verison are you using. An older one or a newer one?
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One also should ask whether you are dealing with outlook, or outlook express (not the same product, and outlook is the business oriented product).
Also, it is not clear from your question if this is something you desire to do, or something undesirable that you believe someone else has done on a machine you are using?
It should be noted that most email readers are usually configured not to immediately delete mail items, but to put deleted mail items into a deleted folder (or sometimes to mark them for deletion in the current location), and then have to go through a separate phase of confirming deletion of the mail item (thus allowing you to recover the item you have accidentally marked for deletion up until the second phase). Sometimes the mail reader is configured to automatically clear out deleted mail items when you close the mail reader, so that you don't need to actually confirm the deletion, but can recover the deleted items up until logging out, and after that they are lost.
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One also should ask whether you are dealing with outlook, or outlook express (not the same product, and outlook is the business oriented product).
Outlook, as stated in the question.
Also, it is not clear from your question if this is something you desire to do, or something undesirable that you believe someone else has done on a machine you are using?
This is something i want to do. I want to disable the delete email function.
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I am not that familiar with MS-Outlook (have used it, and set it up, occasionally, but never gone into it in depth), but I am not sure that any email reader would implement a policy where mail was stored in perpetuity.
I can imagine cases where installations would desire this for archival purposes, but this would normally be implemented by taking copies of all emails on the server, and then backing up offline when the volume became too great to leave them online. I have never seen this functionality implemented in the mail reader.
Another question I have - why do you want to do this?
The three reasons why I can imagine you might want to do this are:
1) You don't trust yourself not to delete critical emails. As I said, you do have a two stage delete, that you can configure in various ways, to partly mitigate this.
2) You are worried about someone else having access to your machine, and deleting mail items before you get to read them. Not sure how you get around them, except not give them access to your mail in the first place.
3) You want to be able to download mail on two different machines, and don't want to have the fact that you downloaded the mail on machine A to prevent you from accessing mail on machine B. If you are using IMAP as a mail protocol, then you can access mail from both machines, but by default configuration, you can delete mail from either machine. If you are using the more common POP3 protocol, then the issue is not about preventing deletion of the mail on the local machine (that is only a local copy of the mail anyway), but about not removing it from the POP3 server when it downloads the mail - this is very possible, and simply changing a setting in the Accounts that describe your POP3 set-up for each POP3 account you are downloading from.
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I can't really say why i need to disable the delete feature, i just do! I have left word with the IT dept. to see if they can do it.