Older emails past 2 days are missing from my inbox in Outlook. Need to restore them.

Hi Albert Guevara, 

I hope you’re doing well.
Thank you for reaching out, and I appreciate you sharing the details about your situation. 

Before we proceed, please note that this is a user-to-user community forum. As a moderator, I don’t have access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, your account, or your device to make changes directly. However, I’ll do my best to support you by sharing the appropriate resources and directing you to the right support channels. 

Based on what you described, it’s possible that some older emails were either already moved into Deleted Items earlier (by a rule, cleanup feature, or retention/archiving policy) and were then removed when you cleaned the folder, or deleted while viewing Search Results, which can include messages from multiple folders not just the Inbox. 

Here are some steps you can take to help address the issue: 

1/ Recover emails removed from “Deleted Items” 

This option recovers items that were deleted from Deleted Items and may still be available for a limited time. 

1. Open Classic Outlook
2. Go to the Deleted Items 
3. Select Recover items recently removed from this folder 
   
4. Select the emails you want to restore. 
5. Click Restore Selected Items > OK. 
6. Then go back to your Inbox or Deleted Items to locate the restored emails. 

Also, you can try those steps using Outlook on the web (OWA) 

2/ Check Archive folders  

Sometimes older emails are automatically moved out of Inbox into Archive. 

• Open Classic Outlook
• Look for Archive folder 
  
• Search there for the missing messages and move them back if needed. 

3/ Check if a rule or cleanup feature moved/deleted older emails 

To help you avoid this happening again and keep things running smoothly, you can check the following in Classic Outlook:

• Rules  
• Go to File > Manage Rules & Alerts. 
• Under Email Rules, look for any rule actions such as move to Deleted Items, delete, archive, or move to a folder. 
• Untick (disable) any suspicious rules > click Apply > OK.  
• Conversation Cleanup 
• Go to File > Options > Mail.  
• Scroll down to Conversation Clean Up 
• Check “Cleaned-up items will go to this folder” (often set to Deleted Items) and change it if needed.  

For further information, you can refer to this article: Recover and restore deleted items in Outlook - Microsoft Support 

4/ Contact support 

If you still can’t find the emails, there may be admin-side recovery options available, depending on your organization’s retention settings and how long ago the deletion occurred. Therefore, please contact your organization’s IT administrator to check the retention/recovery options on your mailbox. 
If needed, your IT team can also raise a support ticket with Microsoft Support team for deeper investigation, especially if the emails are no longer available in standard recovery locations. This allows backend checks to determine whether data can still be restored.

In case you do not know who is your IT admin, kindly refer to this article: How do I find my Microsoft 365 admin? - Microsoft Support  

I hope this information is helpful. Should you have any further questions or need additional assistance, please feel free to share them in the comment below. I'm always happy to help. 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this. 

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