One of the most common questions buyers and sellers ask is, “do eBay messages get deleted?” The answer is, unfortunately, yes. The e-commerce corporation erases them after 6 months so that they don’t clog their servers unnecessarily. Furthermore, users often delete messages willingly or accidentally or suffer data loss, further making the situation worse. Luckily, knowing this for a fact doesn’t mean you have to comply and let things go, and we’re willing to assist you. With that said, let’s jump straight into how to recover eBay messages.
1. Recover eBay messages from Trash
We already mentioned a 6-month period above- That applies to Trash, eBay’s safeguard feature against accidental removal of messages. With that mentioned, do this to retrieve deleted eBay messages from Trash:
- Go to the Account panel by clicking on My eBay in the upper right corner.
- Switch over to the Messages tab.
- Click on Trash in the sidebar on the left.
- Select the message you want to recover or put checkmarks in front of multiple messages.
- Click on Move To in the upper left corner.
- Select a folder to move it to.
- Tip. You can also click on Save Messages to save it to local storage as a ZIP file. Up to 200 messages can be saved at once.
2. eBay message restoration from Archive
If you followed the instructions above, you must’ve noticed an Archive option below Trash (step 3). There’s a strong chance that you also archived a message in the past, which is then kept for 6 months as well.
3. Recovering eBay conversations from local storage
With any luck, you might have saved eBay chats to your storage in the past, thus bypassing the 6-month recovery limit. Lucky for you, eBay does not give you an option to rename the ZIP archive. So, regardless if you chose EML or HTML format, the archive will be titled: eBay-username_year_month_day_random characters_random characters.zip. For example, eBayuser_2021_04_22_…_…zip, hence why you should search the storage for the first 4 parameters. You can then open the messages in any e-mail client (EML) or browser (HTML).
4. Recover eBay messages via data recovery software
This is a desperate attempt, mainly functional if you’ve used the eBay app for Android or iOS. If so, data recovery software can scan your storage for the remains of deleted messages, whether accidental or by eBay. We demonstrated this under method 2 of our Keepsafe photo recovery guide. The only adjustment you’ll need is to select App Documents instead of Photos in step 7.
5. Contact eBay Customer Service
Another way to recover eBay messages is to reach out to eBay Customer Support. We described how this works in our “recover eBay account” guide, under method 4, option 1. We suggest selecting Managing your contact information under step 3.
