Lately I’ve wondered, both idly and with real longing, whether I could ever get any of my mom’s emails back. What I discovered isn’t as simple as a yes or no, and it reveals something about how profoundly our hope for and fear of the digital forever has altered our most elemental ways of grieving and of understanding loss.

Google declined to comment for this story, but I asked Steve Atkins, a software developer specializing in email infrastructures, whether it would ever be possible to get those messages back. No, he says: “If you have sent an email and you have accidentally deleted it, unless the person you’ve sent it to has a copy, you’re never going to get it back.” It’s not necessarily because parts of the data aren’t there, but because of the way that email systems are built: archival storage of system backups and historical data aren’t a priority for commercial companies. Atkins explained to me that the user experience of opening an inbox and deleting an email isn’t representative of what actually happens on the server side. When you delete an email, Atkins says, what you’re really doing is flagging it for future deletion. It’s still on the server, though, “if the [email] client asks about mail, the server will say no, there’s no mail,” and it won’t appear in your inbox. But it will still be there, he says. And it may sit there for a while, probably for hours or even days, until your mailbox is expunged, a process in which the server creates a copy of your mailbox without the deleted messages, and then physically overwrites the original. That’s when it’s truly gone.

Expunged data “actually does not exist anywhere” anymore—not as anything that would be legible, anyway. Big email services like the ones Google and Yahoo and MSN provide keep backups of server data, but usually only “for them to recover if something goes terribly wrong,” Atkins says. While Atkins is not connected to Google, a lot of information about their operations is public: the company has published hundreds of research papers about data management, software, and systems architecture. He guesses that Google’s backups probably stick around for a few weeks before they, too, are expunged.

In another way, though, those deleted emails do survive, though—or, at least, the data that Google has extracted from them in order to build your user profile has. Atkins suspects that even after a message has been deleted, “it’s possible somebody smart” could use the extracted user profile data to piece together what you’d been writing about. That’s unlikely, he says. And even if they did, what they could reconstruct wouldn't actually be the message, just its traces—they would only know it was an email about a particular topic.

But my mother’s words without her voice (such as it is) are just static. I can’t recover her recipes or her enthusiasm for the things she loved. Every time I get served an ad for a fawning book about the Founding Fathers or for a deviled egg tray, it’s a kind of tiny haunting: a palimpsest of what once was, stripped of what made it really meaningful. And those tiny traces may be the problem—not because they can’t allow us to recover the things we’ve lost, but because they allow us to believe that we can. When we hear that data lives forever on the internet, it’s hard to understand that it’s sometimes more like garbage that won’t biodegrade than it is a reconstructible fragment.