Outlook Email Recovery - Corrupt first and then rebuild
I have spent the last 5 hours trying to help some guy retrieve email that they thought they had accidentally deleted in Outlook. After some research, I find that this is possible…when users delete email in Outlook, you can retrieve it as long as you don’t compact the PST file. By the way, this only works if you have set up POP3 as the method of retrieving email.
The way POP3 works is that it stores email in a PST file, and when you delete emails (even after you have emptied the Deleted Items folder, the email aren’t really deleted, they are simply flagged as deleted and that they are not shown by Outlook.
Below is the method of retrieving your email
- Turn Outlook off
- Locate your PST file
- Run corrupt.exe YourOutlookfile.pst (you can download corrupt.exe here)
- Start “c:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\SCANPST.EXE” or whichever version you have.
Please note that if you are using Outlook XP, you will have to use the scanpst.exe from Outlook XP, scanpst.exe from Outlook 2003, will not be able to recover a pst created from Outlook XP.
Below are sources with more info on this topic:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5054599.html
http://www.gettingclever.com/2008/06/corrupting-your-outlook-pst-file.html
Know good tool for recover mails-outlook mail recovery,as how as i remember program is free,it recover data from Microsoft Outlook pst files, program can be also used to recover information from Microsoft Exchange ost files and/or convert them into Microsoft Outlook pst files,restore mail messages, tasks, contacts, meetings, notes and logs in files with the .pst extension,recover Outlook files and data from corrupted pst files of all Microsoft Outlook mail clients, from Microsoft Outlook 97 to Microsoft Outlook 2003,save the recovered information as files with the *.pst extension, you should have the Microsoft Outlook 98 mail client or higher installed on your computer,runs under all Windows operating systems starting from Windows 98 (Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP).