Inbox Repair Tool

Microsoft Outlook stores emails of different user accounts inside a PST (Personal Storage Table) file. These PST files are the basic storage units of Outlook and store various email components locally. Apart from storing email messages, PSTs store other Outlook components, such as Contacts, Notes, Journals, Calendar Entries, Tasks, and Address Book etc. Whatever you create, receive or send using your Outlook are stored in a large PST file. Therefore, if any problem happens with the PST file, all your mailboxes and other information in Outlook become completely inaccessible.

There are a number of situations, when the PST files get corrupted. The reasons can be over-sized PST file, header corruption, virus infection, software malfunction etc. To deal with such situations, Microsoft has provided the 'Inbox Repair Tool' to repair the corrupt PST file.

About Microsoft Inbox repair utility:

This Inbox repair utility or Scanpst.exe comes installed in Microsoft Outlook. When you install Windows in your system, a hidden file with the name scanpst.exe gets automatically installed. This is indeed the Outlook repair utility that Microsoft suggests in case of any corruption to your PST files.

How to Use Inbox Repair Tool:

In order to run the Inbox Repair Tool, you need to follow few systematic steps as below:

• Close Outlook and do not open it until the repairing process gets completed.
• Find all the PST files in your system by searching for *.pst files.
• Take the backup of all PST files.
• Locate the file (scanpst.exe) from your system and run it.
• Provide the location of the PST files, when asked by scanpst utility.
• Click 'Start' to begin the scanning process. The utility locates the errors and repairs the same.

Once, the corrupt PST file is repaired, you can see a list of recovered folders in the left pane of your Outlook application. You need to create a new .pst file in your profile and move the recovered items into it, so that they can be used as before.

Limitations of Scanpst:

However, there are situations of severe corruption, when this Microsoft inbox repair utility can not fix the corruption. Also, novice users find difficulty in locating the scanpst program in the system, as the program has a varied location with respect to different operating systems. Apart from these, below are some of the serious limitations of scanpst utility:

• The scanpst utility repairs the header of the corrupt PST file and removes all the parts from the file, which it can not understand. Hence, if it is a case of header corruption due to version upgrade or something similar, the utility solves the problem well. But, in case of any damage to the content of the file, scanpst removes the content, resulting in serious data loss.
• In case, you are using Microsoft Outlook 2002 or earlier version and your corrupt PST file has a size beyond 2 GB, scanpst will not work.

In order to overcome all such issues, Stellar has developed one advanced utility, 'Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair'. The utility incorporates extremely powerful programs to deal with severely damaged PST files and recovers the email components in a new PST file. The software has been designed with absolutely read-only repair techniques. Stellar Outlook repair has lots of useful features, such as selective mailbox recovery, recovery of deleted mails, recovery of encrypted PST and many more. Moreover, the user interfaces of the software are highly interactive and provide a smooth recovery experience.