As Outlook provides various outstanding features to make emailing more comfortable and manageable, this has become the prominently used email client among millions of users across the world. Outlook is more than just an email client as it proficiently acts as a personal information manager. With its simple and user friendly functionalities, it is very easy to operate and tech savvy. But, we never know that how the Outlook works or how does it display the message after asking request to it. Outlook saves all of its data and information in the form of PST files. PST files are the main storage files which contain all the folders, profile settings, rules and Outlook configurations. The disastrous situation happens when these PST files somehow get corrupted or damaged. Any kind of damage to these files leads to inaccessibility to the data stored in the file causing huge data loss. In fact, you may even lose the data permanently if you don’t have the backup of the data.

There are several factors that affect the PST files of MS Outlook and may hamper their structure causing a big damage to the data residing inside the files. The possible reasons include virus attack, header file corruption, exceeding the set limit of database file size and many others. Whatever is the cause, the impact goes to data residing inside the file letting the users not to access the data. At this kind of situation, the first and foremost step that should be taken is to recover the PST file as soon as possible.

To understand the scenario in better sense, consider that PST files are stored on a primary server. Suppose, you migrate your server for some reasons and after completion of the process, you may observe that some of the clients encountering .PST file corruption issues. The reason behind such behavior is PST files are not meant for file sharing, thus, they don’t provide any security to data and long-term retention when used in enterprise environment. The easiest solution to this problem is to implement Outlook built-in tool which is called Inbox Repair Tool or Scanpst.exe. To execute this tool, follow the steps given below:

1. Exit Outlook and click Start-> Search or Find (based on the operating system in use)

2. Click All files and folders option in Search window and type 'scanpst.exe'. Before doing so, you should make sure that 'Show hidden files and folders' setting is enabled as scanpst.exe is a hidden file.

3. Click to Search and you will see the scanpst.exe file in the search results after it completes.

4. Open the file by double-clicking it

5. Specify or browse to the location of corrupted PST file

6. Click to Start the repair process

7. Exit the tool and try to open the PST file

The above method works only when the degree of corruption is minor. For severe corruption you need to install third party repair PST recovery tool. Kernel for Outlook PST Repair gives a professional approach to recover deleted emails, contacts, calendar items, notes and emails with attachments in a few mouse clicks. With quick algorithm this tool is capable of scanning the corrupted PST files and displays the recovered items in tree like structure. Supporting all versions of MS Outlook, this tool is available with its free evaluation copy.