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We’ve all done it at some point before. Going through a series of messages, we’ve accidentally deleted one. Come on, you can admit it. Sometimes we’re just a bit too quick to click the trackball, and it can turn into disaster. So what do you do in that case? Resign yourself to having lost the message permanently? While that might work for some, others want to recover it. Let’s take a look at how we can achieve this.

For a while, the stock answer has been “you can’t do that.” Once you delete something, it’s gone, and too bad for you. Thankfully, with a number of people having this question and asking it on forums, we’re able to figure out ways around the problem and recover our lost messages.

First we’ll look to timrcanada, poster at BlackBerry Forums, to see if his solution works. He claims:

Actually there is a workaround to this but you will have to spend time working on each message one by one…

Select the Search icon on your BB and do a search of your deleted messages if you can remember anything in the title or content of the message and if found, copy the message and forward it to another address ie your own hotmail addy etc.

You cannot forward deleted messages directly from the search…
You have to open the message, copy the content, then switch to create a new email message, paste the content, enter your forwarding email address in the to: field, type a subject and then you can send… phew!

I tried this on my Curve with both an SMS and an email. Both times, the search function did not find the deleted message. It appears this does not work. Perhaps it does with an earlier OS (I’m on 4.5)? If anyone wants to test this, let me know the results. For now, we’ll call it debunked. This was, by the way, timrcanada’s only post on BB Forums.

Thankfully, the next comment down gives us a better solution. It’s from a company called Dexrex, which aims to improve instant messaging. They offer BlackBerry software which can record your SMS conversations. This way, if you lose one you won’t lose it for good. This seems like the best way, currently, to secure the text messages on your BlackBerry. It only works for SMS right now, though the company claims it is working on extending the capability to BlackBerry PIN messages.

If you want to test out Dexrex, you can point your BlackBerry Browser to http://www.dexrex.com/mobile/blackberry. You’ll go through the OTA download process. If you do, let me know how it works. If I get around to testing it myself, I’ll post a quick review on the site.

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