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Does a deleted email remain on the server?

1 points by taurusnoises ↗ HN
Noon here. Hi. My super basic understanding re email this:

- email lives on a server - Gmail is the user interface for engaging with your emails - when you delete an email, you remove it from the UI/Gmail platform, but not from the server

Am I thinking of this correctly? Is a platform like Gmail more of a way to curate your experience of what is permanently /semipermanently(?) kept on the server?

6 comments

[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] thread
bombcar
Depends on how the server is implemented.

Most deletions move it to a Trash folder either via the UI or IMAP and eventually the trash is emptied.

But even after that the server may have access to the email for some period of time for undelete/restore.

And of course any backups.

calrain
I'm pretty sure it takes a while for an email to be properly deleted in most online email systems, as it will have to flush through replicas, backups, etc. for a while.

Some metadata about emails may also be stored permanently out of the email system.

There is no guarantee that an email service provider deletes all copies of an email when you press 'delete' on the email, but most likely after a while the email will not be recoverable.

It _really_ depends on so many things.

taurusnoises
This helps. Thanks. I'm trying get a conceptual understanding of the relationship between "the server" (which I'm only just starting to understand) and the UI/UX.
uberman
Whatever the "server" is, that would be an implementation detail, unless your question if more about the IMAP and POP3 protocols and what they are "supposed to do".
SirChainsaw
Conceptually you're pretty much there, sir. Gmail is mostly just an interface to googles mail servers.

Gmail's UI doesn't do the actual deleting of email, it just instructs the email server to delete it.

However, I have no idea how the email servers behind that are actually configured. I wouldn't be surprised if emails are actually just hidden or archived but they'll "look" like they've been deleted.

Hope this helps.

taurusnoises
Thanks, it does. I'm trying to conceptually understand how some of this works (completely devoid of any CS background other than basic code knowledge, but even that... Yikes). So this helps.