How to Restore Emails from an OST File?

You may find several situations that demand recovery of emails from your Offline Storage Table i.e. OST file, like

• When Exchange Database (EDB) file broken
• If you want to restore specific attributes from OST file
• When you wish to move mailbox from current server to another

So, here is the detailed procedure to extract emails from OST file along with other attributes like contacts, calendar etc.(If you need).

Precondition: To restore Exchange mailbox items from your OST file, your Outlook account should be in Cached Exchange Mode. Since cached mode allows Outlook to locally create and save a replica of your mailbox. Thus, you can rapidly access and sync your personal data with Exchange Server. Also, this OST file gets updated frequently with your Microsoft Exchange server.

Follow this simple step by step guide to recover emails from OST file.

• Go to Start and open Control Panel
• Launch Mail application
• Click on E-mail Accounts and select your Exchange account
• Hit Change button
• Opt More Settings in Change Account wizard
• Internet E-mail Setting window will pop-up
• Switch to Advanced tab
• Uncheck Use Cached Exchange Mode
• Apply change and click on Outlook Data File Settings option
• Next, Outlook Data File Settings wizard will emerge
• Make Disable Offline Use selection
• Opt Yes when you see the message Outlook will not be able to work with OST files
• Now, you will reach More Settings screen
• Browse key will be disabled until you enable Outlook Data File Settings option
• So, enable Browse button and using it, select your old OST file
• Hit OK, first in Outlook Data File Settings, then in Microsoft Exchange (More Settings) screen
• Choose Use Cached Exchange Mode option, once you reach Change Account window
• Hit Next followed by Finish key
• Launch your Outlook application
• You will see, Outlook is using an old copy of your Outlook data file (.OST) confirmation text
• Say OK
• Wait until your Outlook profile loads completely
• Don’t make any effort of re-launching the Outlook
• Once Outlook opened properly, you can see all your emails of OST file with other attributes like contacts, calendar etc.

Note: OST works only with respective email profiles. And it doesn’t help you, during any disastrous situations like damage, deletion or corruption of email profile. So, you cannot access your Outlook profile or data at those conditions.

In case, if your OST file is corrupted and you are prevented from accessing the Outlook then you can convert it to PST and fix. Here's how to convert OST to PST on Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, 2000, or Microsoft Exchange 5.0, 5.5 profiles. Remo OST to PST Converter makes the conversion job simpler on all versions of Windows OS.