Can I retrieve deleted emails I've deleted from my bin & trash folder on my Apple Mac?

No guarantees, but worth a try.

On your Mac, open up your mail program and then open up the Trash folder

Then.....open up Time Machine on your Mac by clicking on the "clock" icon at the top of the Mac's screen and then clicking on Enter Time Machine

Give things 5-15 minutes to load

Using the timeline scale on the right side of the Time Machine window, go back to a point in time right before you deleted the files from the Trash

See if the old files might still be there

If so, click Restore at the bottom of the Time Machine window

If the Restore works, you may see a new different Trash icon when you open up the mail program again

nothing in 'real terms' is ever completely gone, surely there's a way to retrieve them?

Sorry, but not likely. But, you will need a court order to your mail provider to find out for sure. Even then, the provider may not have kept them, or kept them for a very short period.

That might be why politicians get in big trouble for deleting their emails, since they really are "gone" in most cases.

If you really need the emails, you can try opening your "In Box" or "New Mail Box" and then go back in time using Time Machine to try to find them that way......before they were sent to the Trash. Going to take a very long time to work through this though.

Same basic process as before.

You will have to first open the "New Mail" or "Inbox" in your mail program

Then, open Time Machine and give it some time to load

Use the timeline scale at the right of the Time Machine window to go back to various dates in the past to see how the "New Mail" or "Inbox" looked at that given time. You might want to start with a recent backup first, then work your way back in time.

If you see an email that was deleted, click the Restore button

Keep repeating the same process with other dates in Time Machine. It's going to take a long time.......maybe a very long time......before you notice any real progress, because you will be looking for emails one at a time.

Frankly, I've never done anything like this.....looking for hundreds of emails. That may take forever. I've always just gone back a few days to find an email that was Trashed and deleted by mistake.

Perhaps another user who has done something like this will post with some tips to help us out.

Sorry, but I cannot really add any more to what I've already said. I went through this again to double check as follows:

I opened my Mail application, which displays a mail account that is using an AOL email address

(If you are using a different type of email address, then things may not be the same as AOL)

I clicked on the In Box to display current email messages in that mailbox

Opened up Time Machine and gave the application about 10 minutes to load

The current messages in the In Box are displayed

I clicked on the timeline at the right of Time Machine window and selected a date about a week ago

Time Machine took a few seconds to display the In Box for that date, which was of course different than the current In Box

There is a Restore button at the bottom of the In Box display. If I click on Restore, the week old In Box will appear in my current Mail program and I can look at the messages that way.

But, to do this looking for hundreds of different emails on different dates is going to take tons of time. I can't guess how much time would be involved for something like this.

It is amazing that Apple was able to provide the old deleted emails. Also a bit scary to realize how much of your other personal data they possess.