Repair Corrupt Outlook PST File

I ran into a problem with a client's PC where email messages from various folders disappeared. The client, using MS Outlook 2007, indicated that he was trying to clean out some old and unnecessary emails, but somehow the entire Inbox disappeared.

My initial guess after checking the Deleted Items folder for the missing information was that the client accidentally deleted the items without realizing it and then emptied the Deleted Items folder. The client assured me that he did not empty the deleted items and so I was off on Plan B.

I grabbed a copy of the PST file and ran the Outlook Inbox Repair Tool (SCANPST) on it just in case the PST file was corrupt. Unfortunately, this did not recover any additional messages even though the SCANPST software indicated that there were issues with the file.

There are a lot of results on the internet about recovering deleted items if you are running Microsoft Exchange. Unfortunately, this was not the case with this client as he was POP-ing mail from his ISP.

I did some additional research and found a solitary article on outlook-tips.net about manually (and carefully) corupting the PST file by clearing a number of bytes from the header of the file and then re-running the SCANPST software on it.

In this case, the solution worked for this client. This process recovered a number of emails -- even ones that had been deleted for quite some time.

After importing the recovered emails back to his active PST file, I compacted the file and had a very relieved client.

Note: in case outlook-tips.net is offline, the process to corrupt the file was to reset positions 7 through 13 of the PST file in UltraEdit with a space (changing the hex value to 20).