How to Recover Gmail Chat I Accidentally Deleted

Techwalla may earn compensation through affiliate links in this story. Learn more about our affiliate and product review process here.

Deleted Gmail chat logs and messages remain in your Trash folder for 30 days, and you can find them there to return them to your Inbox. Gmail automatically logs chat sessions unless you manually disable chat logging.

Recovering a Message or Chat Log From the Trash

Step 1

Image Credit: Image courtesy of Google.

To see your deleted messages in Gmail, click the Trash label in the left pane.

Advertisement

Video of the Day

Step 2

Image Credit: Image courtesy of Google.

Locate the message or chat log you want to recover and click its check box.

Advertisement

Step 3

Image Credit: Image courtesy of Google.

Click the Move To button and then select Inbox in the pop-up menu to restore the message to your inbox.

Advertisement

Going Off the Record in Gmail Chat

By default, Gmail saves a complete transcript of each of your chat sessions in a folder called Chats.

Advertisement

Video of the Day

You can disable it from logging a particular chat session through that session's Options menu.

Advertisement

Step 1

Image Credit: Image courtesy of Google

In a chat session, click the Options icon.

Advertisement

Step 2

Within the Options menu, uncheck the Hangout History option to stop logging the session.

Advertisement

A message will appear in the chat window and the chat window of the person you're chatting with indicating that chat history logging has been disabled.

Advertisement

Advertisement

references