Deleted Calendar and Contacts folders not showing in the Deleted Items folder
I recently deleted some old Calendar and Contact folders which I thought I no longer needed. However, it appears that I do. I haven’t emptied my Deleted Items folder in a while so these folders must still be there.
Sometimes, there is an indication that the Deleted Items folder is containing sub folders but when I click on the triangle to expand the Deleted Items folder, it just disappears and doesn’t show anything.
How can I recover them and why is the triangle disappearing?
When you are in the Mail Navigation (CTRL+1), you won't see any folder which isn’t a Mail folder. However, up to Outlook 2007, this filtering is done upon expanding a parent folder.
So initially, Outlook only knows that the folder contains subfolders and shows the expansion icon. When you click on it and none of the sub folders appear to be a Mail folder, the expansion icon disappears.
Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 often no longer initially show this expansion icon in the Mail Navigation if the sub folder isn’t a mail folder.
Switch to the Folder List Navigation
Switch to the Folder List Navigation (CTRL+6) to see all folder types and thus your full folder list and its structure.
Note: If you already emptied the Deleted Items folder, you could still try to recover them via the Recover Deleted Items option when using Exchange. When you use a pst-file you’ll have to restore the items from backup or you can try to recover them via this procedure or via specialized data recovery tools.
