How Long Does Gmail Keep Deleted Emails in Servers? Facts About Gmail

Gmail has proved to be a useful platform for most businesses. It provides a never-ending range of capabilities that companies and individuals can use to their advantage.

Whether you’re using your personal Gmail account or Google Workspace for your business, Google handles your email messages in the same way.

Yet, while deleting emails, users want to know how long are deleted emails stored in Gmail.

There are several stages of “Emails Deletion” when it comes to Google:

1. When email is deleted and moved to Trash
2. Emails being remove from Trash after 30 days’ policy
3. End of 60 day’s policy of Google

All the points as mentioned above are going to be explained in the upcoming section.

Case 1 – How Long Does Gmail Keep Deleted Emails in Servers When Email is Moved to Trash?

Whenever a message is deleted, it is removed from your inbox, but moved to the Trash folder. Because of this, you can still recover it from the Trash folder within a period of 30 days.

If you do not want to recover the email and are certain of it, you can quicken the process. Choose the messages you want to be deleted and then press the “Delete Forever” button on the menu bar.

Let’s take a look at the second case.

Case 2 – How Long Are Deleted Emails Stored in Gmail After the Period of 30 Days?

In this case, the email messages might still exist somewhere on the Gmail servers for 60 days, but to restore the message you need to contact Google.

You will need to fill a form with all the details of the respective email and send it to Google.

Case 3 – What Happens After 60 Days Policy of Google Ends?

Note that if you remove an email “forever” from your spam or trash files, it will stay on Google’s servers for up to 60 days after you delete it.

This typically answers how long does Gmail keep deleted emails in servers. Since Gmail stores backups of its email systems in offline storage, your messages can stay there indefinitely.

With that in mind, while it’s clear how long the messages will stay in your account before being deleted, it’s impossible to say how long they will exist.

After going through these cases, we will now go through the reasons that lead users to delete their emails. But before that, let’s take a look at the backup tool.

Ideal Step Before Deleting and Asking; How Long Are Deleted Emails Stored in Gmail

If the user plans to delete his/her emails, then removing them before taking a backup might not be a wise decision. After being deleted from the trash folder either by you or Google automatically, it becomes very difficult to retrieve them.

By deleting your emails there are chances of losing important email messages and never being able to retrieve them.

Thus, it is recommended to take backup of your emails using the software as mentioned above on your system before deleting them.

When Does a User Want to Delete Emails?

1. To save space– Users generally delete emails and ask how long does Gmail keep deleted emails in servers and similar queries when it’s about space.

Google offers 15 Gigabytes of storage space, which is shared among Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Thus, after a certain amount of time, users must delete some of their emails in order to prevent an accumulation of unwanted emails.

2. To get rid of old emails– There are a lot of old emails which we are not going to need in the future, it is better to remove them from our Gmail account to make it clutter-free.

3. To be able to look for urgent messages fast– Another reason why users delete and get curious about how long are deleted emails stored in Gmail is to be able to quickly search for urgent messages.

If you have a number of pointless emails in your inbox, it would be difficult to locate the urgent messages to which you would respond first.

4. Avoid Cluttered Gmail– A cluttered Gmail account decreases your productivity thus it is preferred to delete useless emails.

To Sum Up

Even after you or Google erase the deleted emails from the Trash folder after 30 days, copies will be stored on Google servers. You can learn about how long does Gmail keep deleted emails in servers by going through the facts mentioned here.

Emails are usually removed from servers after about 2 months, and are stored in (additionally encrypted) backups on Google servers for about 6 months. As a result, deleted emails will remain on Google servers in some sort for about 7 months after being transferred to the Trash folder.

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