I installed and used Recuva on 11 April, hoping to recover a few OE Emails that had been accidentally deleted.
I find Recuva highly impressive, easy to use, perfect recovery of all deleted Emails and no trouble at all. Thank you so much Piriform for producing such a remarkable program.
Limitations - All Emails deleted in the normal way are recovered perfectly, but Emails deleted by a sandbox program are lost forever. This is I suppose to be expected., they are in a virtual environment and treated as threats. I lost a few Sent and Received Emails between 2 April and 10 April due to stopping and disabling a sandbox Program - Toolwiz Timefreeze.
They were not important, but intensely annoying to lose. I did not realize that my OE was sandboxed by Toolwiz Timefreeze. The accident occurred by checking the "Folders" option. ALWAYS leave this option unchecked when using this program. Ah well, we live and learn.
Question ? All the recovered OE Emails came up with a Thunderbird icon and on opening, the mail was displayed on Thunderbird ! What if the user has not got Thunderbird ? What happens then ? Perhaps somebody can explain the Thunderbird aspect.
Keyscrambler - If you use this program or any other key scrambling program, then ALL deleted and recovered SENT Emails will be displayed in gobble-de-gook and be no use at all. ALL RECEIVED Emails are OK and perfectly readable as most senders do not use key scrambling on their Email systems.
This has learnt me to switch Keyscrambler OFF when constructing a SENT Email so that on recovery, the text will be normal. I have at present dumped Toolwiz Timefreeze in sheer anger, but it is a good program and ideal now that Win XP has been orphaned by MS. I will probably re-install it, but will make sure the "Folders" option is NOT checked next time, so that all Email folders are exluded from being sandboxed.
I suppose a big failing of Recuva is that although all the deleted Emails are listed and can be read in a file created by the Recuva program, there is no RESTORE facility to restore the Emails back to their original folders in the Email program, which is exactly what the users wants.
This results in only doing half the job instead of fully completing it.