Accidental loss of emails due to compacting and weak protection of the pst file

In Microsoft Exchange Server, the messages, the calendar, and other data items are delivered to and stored on the server. Microsoft Outlook stores these items in a personal-storage-table (.pst) or off-line-storage-table (.ost) files that are located on the local computer. Most commonly, the .pst files are used to store archived items and the .ost files to maintain off-line availability of the items.

The .pst and .ost files use a fixed-block-based allocation scheme; the file is enlarged by a fixed amount of bytes, and the file internally maintains information about the allocated and non-allocated blocks. So, when data files like email messages are added to a .pst file, its file size is automatically adjusted by the mail client (if necessary). When mail is deleted from a .pst file, the size of the .pst file will stay the same, marking the space as unallocated so that it will hold future data items. Recently removed data items can actually be recovered from .pst and .ost files.

To reduce the size of .pst files, the user needs to compact them. Password protection can be used to protect the content of the .pst files. However, Microsoft admits that the password adds very little protection, due to the existence of commonly available tools which can remove or simply bypass the password protection. This results in Outlook users losing huge amounts of important data.

To recover accidentally deleted emails, it is best to make use of a professional Outlook Recovery software. REMO Recover Outlook (pst) software, does not truncate the oversized pst file, but creates a new pst file, and copies all the contents of the corrupted pst file, onto the new pst file. In this way, the software lets you recover accidentally deleted emails with utmost ease.

Applied Technologies