What is happening
- It reads your attachments over a private, direct connection to your provider and saves photos one at a time, in original quality, organized by year.
- Providers limit how much can be downloaded. When a limit is reached, recovery pauses until the next day. See Daily limit.
Why it can take multiple days
An inbox with years of photos can be many gigabytes. Providers can throttle downloads to protect your account, so a full recovery may span several days — each day resuming from the last saved checkpoint (if a day ended mid-message, that message is re-checked, but already-saved photos are skipped). See Resume.
What to do
- Leave Continue recovery running each day until it finishes. Progress is saved; you never lose what is already recovered.
- Recovery runs entirely on your computer. It does not upload anything, and it never touches your mail.
It seems stuck
If nothing has progressed for a long while, check your connection and choose Continue recovery. If a single download keeps failing after retries, resume later: it remains eligible instead of being silently called corrupt or skipped. See Network and Corrupt attachments.