Messed up at work. Feel sick

[User292]

This might not sound like a big deal but it is and I’m STUPID!!! I’m literally so stupid for not realising. Everything that I do is largely via email. I send and receive lots of emails daily, i have been at the company for a year and so I’ve got a years worth of emails on my laptop (plus a little more from a few months before I started)

all last week I was getting notifications to say my mailbox is almost full. I was deleting emails that I don’t need to keep but it wasn’t really doing anything, and today I got a notification that said I can’t send or receive any new emails because my inbox is full. I decided, all of the very old stuff can go because I’ve already dealt with it and it’s done. I cleared out all of the emails from June 2023 to June 2024. But my inbox was still full. The notification said to empty my deleted items folder. So I did. Inbox still full. So at this point I messaged my manager and said I don’t know what’s happening with my emails, it’s saying inbox full despite me deleting. He replied saying DO NOT delete any emails!! As we need a trail as backup and evidence of conversations and approvals for things etc. I haven’t replied because I’m hyperventilating. I have just deleted a years worth of emails. I feel really sick why did I do that! I thought I had to and there was no other way around it because it was saying I can’t send or receive any new emails so what else was I supposed to do?! He said there is an archive folder to put them in to clear space but I didn’t know 😢

Not sure what this post is for but needed to just say AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Hahahaha thank god I posted here or I’d be crying right now 😂

Oh OP, I felt this panic with you reading your messages. I know how I would have reacted and I'm guessing you're the same.

I'd suggest not touching anything, even though you can see all the deleted emails. Just contact your IT department, explain the situation and ask them to deal with it now.

And then ask your boss "where's the bloody archive box you've NEVER MENTIONED".

Then get yourself a cuppa and breathe

I only knew this because I was told I'd deleted my boss' Taylor Swift ticket and literally thought I was going to throw up with anxiety. I know exactly what that relief feels like! Although in my defence I hadn't and then felt quite annoyed I'd lost years of my life not only for something trivial but for something that turned out not to be true 🤣

If your manager is telling you not to delete any e-mails and the system is telling you that you have no space to receive them, then you should (except of course that the power dynamics may not allow it!) tell him that he can choose. Either you delete some old ones, or the system deletes all the new ones.

Most companies these days have essentially unlimited archive space for old e-mails, but training people how to do that, and how to prioritise what goes to the archive (in which they are often harder to search, for example) and what doesn't should be part of that training. It's not unreasonable for them to expect you to know how to use e-mail itself, but all archiving systems are different and you probably need to be trained in the data protection aspects too.

Getting a bigger mailbox is not really a solution, because you are just kicking the can down the road while also making it bigger. Think of your mailbox as like a septic tank at the end of your garden — you can dig it out and make a bigger one, but eventually you have to deal with a huge pile of shit, one way or the other. Archiving a big chunk is like a visit from the honey wagon. Enjoy!

Second this! I have my favourite IT lady in my pinned chats on Teams, I never bother going through the IT desk anymore because she is an absolute star

glad you are able to restore them.

We all fuck up from time to time OP so please don't be too hard on yourself.

Pleased to see a happy ending!

When in doubt always ask :) x

I was going to post to reassure you that your emails could be restored but am happy to see that it all worked out.

I (famously. it's still mentioned 🤣) once deleted the entire contents of my email account while trying to 'clean up' the thousands I'd accumulated over many years. I'd learnt about retention and disposal requirements and couldn't wait to apply that knowledge to my emails. Although I can laugh about it now, I remember that sick feeling all too well. I also had no idea that there was a period of time that IT could restore data.
Of course that meant that every single email was restored, including the huge amount I had deleted. It was worse than before I began 😂

You poor thing I know you must have felt such panic.

You and manager/team need to sit down and write down a policy for email retention!

Call IT. I think they can sort it. Or deny yoi did it if it ever comes up, which it might not. Deep breaths

Sounds like you're all sorted, but you can recover deleted items from your Outlook desktop as well - if you go to the deleted items folder, there should be a button at the top that says 'recover deleted items from the server' or similar and you can recover anything deleted in the last week or so.

You need to look at your IT policy first, and see what it says. There may be a limit re deletions in there.

Yes IT can get them back.

If not then you can say you were not told to keep them all so you didn't know.

Then get IT to increase your mail box and create a back up where all the old ones go.

Honestly in my career I've done worse. Mistakes happen and few are so bad they come back to bite you.

I know someone who makes errors because she doesn't give a shit all the time and even when they come back to bite her nothing is ever done.

nothing electronic ever really goes away! Which is bad and good...

This is on your manager, how are you supposed to know not to delete?

They can be restored. Ask where/how you are to archive them.

If your business is such you cant delete any emails ever then your business needs to invest in more storage for you!

This is squarely on your manager!

Why haven't they been saved to SharePoint or OneDrive or some other offline folder. What happens if you fall under a bus and your email can't be accessed. Easy access btw is the point of the exercise rather than spending hours hunting things down.

You might want to suggest business continuity management and general risk management to your boss. Email management should be document storage 101.

I'm having the same message - how do I archive stuff to make the message disappear??

Oh, OP we’ve all been there. Glad you got it sorted.

The problem that I have now though is that I can’t recover my deleted items because my inbox is still 95% full. Another problem that I have is every single email from the past 12 months is here… even the stuff that I absolutely don’t need. I can’t sit and sift through it, there’s thousands. Oh dear, what a pickle

@RechargeableGnu If it is the same as OP, it is your online mailbox that is full, not your local (hard) drive.

You need to login in to your emails online through a web browser and delete old emails there that have already been downloaded to your outlook programme.

Just need to message IT to ask for additional storage!

Can you order them into size order (instead of date order)? That way you only have to delete the largest ones you definitely don't need to give you some room.

Get them restored by IT, then filter on the largest. Chances are that you have attachments that are filling up ghe space, you can remove ghe attachments and keep the emails.

Just talk to IT. I used to work in IT and people did this kind of thing every single day. You're not gonna get fired or trust me, literally everyone would be fired.