Recovery of "Deleted" Email

[Florian Weimer]

* Jon Ribbens:

> If the discovery motion is against the webmail provider then,
> unless the webmail provider has a specific system in place to
> archive deleted messages for a period of time, then to all intents
> and purposes I would think that the messages are immediately gone.

"Immediately" is rather unlikely.  In many systems, deleted data is
just marked as deleted and not yet physically overwritten.

In addition, providers offering multiple gigabytes of free mail
storage are not likely to optimize for message deletion.  For small
messages, it might make sense to compress many of them together in a
single data block.