Recoverable Items (Admin)

Restore mail that users permanently deleted, and configure how long your organization keeps recoverable messages.

What are Recoverable Items?

When a user chooses Delete permanentlyfrom Trash or Spam, the message is hidden from their mailbox but retained in MoovMail for admin recovery. This mirrors Gmail's "Delete forever" grace period and Microsoft 365's Recoverable Items folder for deleted mail.

After the configured retention window, MoovMail hard-deletes the message from PostgreSQL and removes raw message and attachment objects from S3/MinIO storage.

Opening Recoverable Items

1. Sign in as an organization admin.
2. Open /admin.
3. Select the Recoverable Items tab.

Required permissions: mailboxes.manage, users.manage, or settings.manage.

Recovery window policy

Each organization sets how long permanently deleted mail stays recoverable:

• Minimum: 14 days
• Maximum: 30 days
• Default: 14 days

Admins with manage access can change this in the Recoverable Items tab under Recovery window (days). The setting applies to all new permanent deletes in the organization.

Restoring mail

1. Filter by mailbox if needed.
2. Select one or more messages.
3. Click Restore selected.

Restored messages return to the user's mailbox in their previous folder (for example Trash if that is where they were when permanently deleted). The user can move them back to Inbox.

Automatic purge

MoovMail runs a scheduled job (approximately hourly) that hard-deletes recoverable messages whose recoverable_until timestamp has passed. Purge removes:

• The email_messages row
• Related attachment metadata
• S3/MinIO objects (raw MIME, HTML/text bodies, attachment files)

This is separate from Trash/Spam auto-retention, which hard-deletes without entering Recoverable Items.

Related guides

• Mail deletion policy (manual & automatic)
• Admin panel overview
• User management