E-mail lost... can it be recovered?

Question

I sent an email with an important document attached. The receiver said they never got it. However, I didn't get an email back saying the email was undeliverable. It was sent via hotmail to a person with an university email. Is there any way to recover it to prove it was sent at a certain time?

Answer 1

Yes...and no.

Incidentally...an e-mail can take up to two weeks to arrive. Generally, several minutes to a couple (2-3) of days is the standard.

That is of course assuming that it actually arrived...a small percentage of e-mails never arrive at their destination - or arrive at the wrong destination.

You could try to thow yourself on the mercy of the Hormail administrators to see if they could recover the e-mail for you (unlikely), or ask the person you were sending it to to have their server admin to see if there is something stuck in their mail server.

In future, when sending "time critical" information such as this document, Cc: yourself. That way if they need you to resend it, you can simply forward the e-mail from your in-box, and the original time stamp(s) will be intact.

Answer 2

Check your sent mail. If there is no copy of it in your sent mail you are out of luck. If there are some routing issues between you and the receiver it can take some time for the return message to come back to you. But even in bad cases it shouldn't take more then a few hours...worst case a day.

If you did send it to him and didn't receive a error message..It probably went through. Could he/she be lying?, deleted it by accident? checked their spam folder?.....Or maybe you sent it to the wrong e-mail address? Mail servers can be pretty iffy at times dropping some incoming or outgoing e-mails. But this is mostly a result from website/domain based e-mail addresses...If your using a ISP and he's on a university e-mail system...chances are both are pretty rock solid...

If you didn't check your sent mail..You should.

Answer 3

I think you are up a creek without a paddle when it comes to proving. It is their word against yours.

Here is a little trick I do though, whenever I mail an important document. I send myself a copy too in the BCC area. What that does is the recipient does not see that you have sent yourself a copy. This way you have proof of the correspondence.

Answer 4

Your computer should have a copy in your "Sent" folder, showing the time originally sent. Look there, and forward the original file to the person in question. You can also print that file and send a copy via regular mail as well, just in case their e-addy is hosed.

Answer 5

The probably is but you would need someone very up to date and very computer literate. Normally with a computer problem I would say look out your door and call the first 12 year old you can catch....but in this case it would be very expensive and time consuming to dig it out of your hard drive You might call your server and see if they can help you, they may still have it in their file system. I'm assuming you check your "sent file"?

Answer 6

I would check your sent folder in your hotmail account.
You might see it there. the other thing you could do is ask the receiver to contact the IT department at the University and see if they can take a look at there firewall. There firewall could have blocked it.

Answer 7

Do you have your hotmail account set up to save all "sent" mail, if so, check there.

Good luck.

Also, failing that, there should be some record of it in hotmail's system, I don't know about their level of customer service...

Answer 8

The only way would be to check your sent mail.

Answer 9

Click the forgot password link, and it'll probably send you your password to your email after typing your email in or something like that, I've never used Netflix before, but it's more than likely it'll be like that.