Microsoft 365 email and the Deleted Mail filter

Overview

You can use the Deleted Mails filter to target specific backed-up email for restoring. This article explains how the filter works.

Details

When emails are moved from one folder to another in Microsoft 365, it internally deletes the email from the first folder and adds a new email to the second folder. The meta-data of the email (date, time, sender, recipients, etc.) doesn't change and the new folder keeps the authenticity of the original email. 

Clumio leverages this behavior to allow filtering emails with the Deleted Mails:yes filter.

Usually, the reason emails are restored is because they were either moved from their original folder location, or they were deleted or archived. Moved, deleted, and archived emails are easily searchable with the Deleted Mails filter. The email is compared to the very first time that it was backed up in folder ABC against any subsequent backup where it got moved from folder ABC to any other folder. 

If any additional filters are applied along with Delete Mails filter, then, like every other filter, it performs AND across both filters. When Deleted Mails:yes and Subject:Sales highlights filters are applied, Clumio returns all the emails that were moved from their original folder (when the first backup happened) and that also had a subject line that contained "Sales highlights" text in it.

This behavior is observed for OneDrive, where if files are moved from one folder to another, they are internally deleted and new files are added into the new folder.