You must sign in at least once in a two-year period to keep your Microsoft account and associated Services active. This means you must sign in to your inbox at least once in a one-year period, otherwise we will close your inbox for you and all email will be deleted. You must use your account to keep it active. This way, parents can be confident that when they delete messages from their children's accounts, they stay deleted. It's not possible to recover messages deleted from children's accounts.

If you want to store your messages in folders other than your Inbox, see Working with message folders.

We don't recommend that you use either of these folders to store your messages. If you don't see the deleted messages you want to recover, they have probably been permanently removed from the Deleted Items folder or Junk Email folder. Junk email is retained for 30 days before it is automatically deleted. Items removed from your Deleted Items folder are recoverable for 30 days. Email is automatically deleted from your Deleted Items folder after 30 days.

How to get back deleted emails outlook