What Is It?

If your Outlook email files become corrupted you may not be able to start Outlook, the program may load slowly or unexpected behaviour or error messages may appear when carrying out operations like moving or deleting emails. What you may not know is that Microsoft provide tools to repair your .pst files (and .ost files for “corporate” Exchange Server setups.

Why Would You Want It?

Quite simply (and obviously ) to repair your email file if they have become corrupted. So if you think your Outlook email has become very slow to startup or is behaving strangely it may be worthwhile trying this solution.

Quite interestingly my Outlook 2003 has been very slow starting up for some time. I thought it was all part of the general slowing down of my XP system which needs to be reinstalled as I reported a short while ago (My Current XP OS is Dying (and Holiday Weekend in the UK)). However yesterday I went to empty the “Deleted Items” folder and got an error message saying

“The messaging interface has returned an unknown error. If the problem persists, start Outlook again.”

I duly restarted Outlook but the same error message appeared when I tried to empty the “Deleted Items” folder again. Now, as you may know Outlook has problems if the .pst file becomes too large, there are also problems with deleting large numbers of files, so I first tried reducing the size of the main folder by archiving emails older than 1 Jan 2008. The archive routine duly produced the folder structure in the new archive.pst I created but wouldn’t move the emails. I could manually move the emails by dragging and dropping but couldn’t empty the deleted items folder. At this point Outlook locked up and I had to terminate it in the Task Manager. On restarting it went through the

“The data file ‘Personal Folders’ was not closed properly. The file is being checked for problems.” checking procedure. However this did not fix the problem (another Microsoft annoyance - why doesn’t it check the file properly ), so at this point I decided to use the pst file repair utility .

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Repairs the Outlook email data storage files

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• MS Utility provided with Outlook

• Simple to use
• Option to backup original file
• Good Information in the Outlook Help file
• Further Information in the Microsoft knowledge base articles

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Why can’t you run it from within Outlook under Tools or Help*

* The “Detect and Repair….” option under “Help” in Outlook does not check and repair the pst data files but users may be mislead into thinking they have exhausted their options having used this.

More About What it Does in Detail:

Microsoft Support article - How to use the Inbox Repair Tools to recover e-mail messages in Outlook 2002, Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 gives extensive details on how to use the repair tool, what it does and how it may delete corrupted data. I would recommend reading this before you use the tool.

There are also details in the Outlook Help file available from the Outlook “Help” Menu. Just enter “repair” in the search box and select “About the Inbox Repair Tool”

(Click on pictures to enlarge)

Having located the repair tool executable and starting the program you see the following screen:

Browse to the pst file you want to repair (see the Outlook Help file of MS Support web page for details of where this is likely to be or simply search your hard disk(s) for *.pst

Clicking on the start button you see the progress bar and information on each of the 8 scan phases.

When the scanning stage is complete you are presented with the following screen.

Here you have the opportunity to backup the original file which I would recommend you do.

When the repair is complete you see the following dialog:

and that’s it

What is the ProReviewer Experience?

I have used the “Inbox Repair Tool” both for my home and work email pst files and it has fixed the problems every time. I am not aware of having lost data but as the files all contained many hundreds of emails, appointments, etc. I cannot be sure. Making sure you regularly backup pst files should help prevent any data loss as you can always open the backup pst file in Outlook. (You can probably also search/index the file using desktop search software providing it is loaded/mounted in Outlook)

Personally I rate this as:

A Very Useful Rescue/Repair Tool

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Freeware, Hints & Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.