Cannot recall PST Password? Tips for safe recovery

A .pst file serves as a repository for Microsoft Outlook data and contains e-mails, calendars, contacts, journals and other components. Since e-mails or attachments may contain confidential information, .pst files, used in business environment, are often password protected. Protecting a .pst file with a password makes sense when you do not want to compromise on the security of data stored in your .pst file. But, the practice has its own pitfalls. Being an Outlook user, you may forget the password of your default .pst file in many scenarios like if you stay out of touch from your office and cannot recall a password or if you have more than one .pst files and you cannot remember the password for one particular file. In such situations, it becomes essential for you to Recover PST Password at the earliest in order to access the data. Though, you can use the pst19upg.exe utility to strip off the PST Password, it may not yield the desired results.

Consider a scenario, wherein, you have three .pst files. You store e-mails, meetings etc related to an upcoming business project in a particular .pst file. Now, you feel the need to make it password protected in order to totally remove the possibility of data or information getting leaked. You apply a complex password, consisting special characters and both uppercase and lowercase letters. Since you do not access this .pst file too often, when you typed in the password, it turned out to be a wrong one. An anxious you would try to strike a right combination but nothing would work. Moreover, since you did not maintain a text file or write the password somewhere, there is no way you can find it.

What to do now?

One possible way is to use the pst19upg.exe utility (not to be considered for Outlook 2003 and 2007) which involves upgrading the old version of .pst files to newer versions. In the meantime, it strips off the password from a .pst file. Thus, you can gain access to the data after using this utility. But, in order to carry out this process, you must have at least three times the size of the .pst file hard disk space available. Ensure you backup the .pst file before using this utility as it may lead to corruption.

Which is the safest way out?

Since using pst19upge.exe has major drawbacks, it would be a wise decision to consider using an appropriate tool in order to Recover PST Password. Such third-party tools employ improved scanning algorithms and extract PST passwords efficiently. Being read-only, these PST Password Recovery tool do not even modify the original data.

Stellar Phoenix Outlook Password Recovery is a reliable tool which recovers lost or forgotten PST passwords in minimal amount of time and without re-indexing the original data. Compatible with MS Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000, the PST Password Recovery Tool generates multiple number of usable passwords.