How to make emails unrecoverable from the trash folder.

[RogerRobot]

I am in the process of moving from my long term 'shaw.ca' email account to gmail and was curious how I may make my emails unrecoverable?

My issue is I have emptied my trash folder, however, if I go into webmail, open the trash folder and click the 'recover' option, many emails still show up as recoverable? 

Thanks.

[RogerRobot]

To answer my own question I think I might just have to wait until 7 days have passed. I deleted stuff from 10+years ago and was concerned it wasn't deleting it, however since I did this recently, I think these will become unrecoverable after 7 days or so from the deletion date, not the email date. I will monitor it.

[RogerRobot]

I waited more than a week and email still remained. I was able to remove this by recovering the email to the trash and then moving to the 'Junk' folder in webmail. Deleting 'Junk 'seemed to permanently remove the emails.

After nearly 25 years of being with Shaw (I had a @Home.com account, long time Shaw internet customers will remember) I am in the process of quitting them and moving to a new ISP so need to wanted to make sure everything was gone when I am 100% with Gmail.

[withheld]

In webmail, in the list of folders at the left, beside the trash folder title is a down arrow.  Clicking this should reveal an "empty trash" option which should remove all the messages permanently.  You should also be able to select individual messages and delete them like you do in a folder like inbox - if you do this from trash or junk, it is a permanent deletion.  You should see a decrease in your quota usage when you do permanent deletions.

Make sure you update any accounts that may use your shaw email as a recovery option, so you can still change "forgotten" passwords and so on.  This update can be more difficult after you pull the plug on a previous email provider - easiest while both old and new email accounts are active.

[withheld]

Note that if you are doing the deleting in some email client and not in webmail. it may handle the view of trash differently than webmail.  The client program may show the messages as gone, but they are still able to be found in webmail.  Depending on settings and whether you use POP or IMAP, it may keep another copy of messages on your own computer/device.

[mdk]

@withheld -- note that Shaw WebMail is an IMAP client. It's my experience that all IMAP clients move a "deleted" message into some "Deleted Items" folder, implying that you must delete the message from that "Deleted Items" folder, to permanently remove the message.

Note that some POP clients have a "leave messages on the mail-server for NNN days" option, before deleting them.

[withheld]

I guess that I should have said "...some *other* email client and not in webmail..." as I did not mean to imply that webmail was not an email client.  I was mostly pointing out the possible difference to a dedicated email client program, one of which is that there is no local copy of the email kept on your device by webmail, while another client program may (or may not) do this. 

I mostly use Thunderbird, in IMAP mode.  I have it set to not move deleted messages anywhere, but to just mark them as deleted.  Then if I purge/compact (what this is called depends on the program) , it permanently deletes them.  If I look in webmail while a message is marked as deleted in Thunderbird, it is nowhere to be seen (including trash).  If I then undelete it in Thunderbird, it reappears in webmail.  So it appears that the marking as deleted removes it from the server, but there is still a copy in the local store in Thunderbird, where it can be "undeleted" from and put back on the server.  It can happen in Thunderbird with some settings where messages can seem to be gone and not seen there, but are still somewhere on the server (possibly in an "archived" state?) - note that this is not the default settings.

The point is that for webmail. it only has the data on the server to show you.  For another client, it may have a local copy of the mail to look at as well as what may be on the server - and these do not necessarily have to be the same.

I used to administer email servers, so I know how many of them work internally (not always quite what the view they present to the clients might imply).  On the server, deleted messages may actually not be gone (at least for a while) no matter what it may show you.   At the least, it likely exists in a backup for some period of time.  The email messages might be stored on the server as individual files, one big file for each email "folder", or blobs in a database where the "location" (folder) of the file or whether it is deleted/read/junk/etc is just some more data in that same database.  I have seen all of these and more.

 IMAP and POP are just ways the server and client send each other the email, not how it might be stored in each.  The IMAP view works and looks similarly to Thunderbird for both Shaw mail and Gmail, even though Gmail presents things in its web view as messages having "labels"  instead of being in folders, and possibly grouping them into "conversations".  I don't know how they actually store the message data, but the Protocol (the last P in IMAP and POP) defines a standard of how it is sent to a client.  In the provider's own web interface, they can show it to you in whatever way they choose.  A separate email client has to follow the rules on how to communicate with the server, but that doesn't define the view it presents to you.  A provider could set up their own protocols for their webmail server to talk to their email server, and write the webmail client to do all sorts of different things.  There might be some good things possible this way, but only someone (Google?) with a lot of resources to write the backends would possibly bother.

Drown them in details!

[mdk]

@withheld --  IMAP and POP are just ways the server and client send each other the email, not how it might be stored in each. 

POP ("Post Office Protocol") can be compared to the mailbox outside of your home.

If you open that mailbox, and remove the contents, and bring them inside your home, then nobody else can open your mailbox, and see the contents. Similarly, POP, in its most-simple mode, permanently moves the messages from Shaw's mail-server onto your "C:" disk-drive.

However, POP has an option: "leave messages on server for NNN days", where the messages do stay in your mailbox on the Shaw mail-server, while a copy is stored on your "C:" disk-drive. If you delete messages from your "C:" disk-drive, they are immediately deleted from the Shaw mail-server. After those "NNN" days, your E-mail client will delete those "stale" messages from Shaw's mail-server. Compare to having two people checking the mailbox on the outside of your home -- if you see a message for the other person, just leave it in the mailbox, hoping that the other person will see it, and remove it, and then you take only "your" addressed messages into your home.

[withheld]

I didn't talk much about POP as it isn't used as much anymore, but you have it mostly right.  I'm not sure how that stuff about someone else looking at your mail applies, though.  I also suspect that this has now strayed so far from the original question that RogerRobot had that none of it applies.