My Experience of Recovering Forgotten PST Password

Feb 10
08:33

2010

Mohit Mathur

Mohit Mathur

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It was the last weekend when I used a commercial PST Password Recovery tool to unlock my Outlook PST . Through this reading, I would like to share my ...

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It was the last weekend when I used a commercial PST Password Recovery tool to unlock my Outlook PST . Through this reading,My Experience of Recovering Forgotten PST Password Articles I would like to share my experience of how I lost and finally recovered the password for the PST.

I use Microsoft Outlook as the default e-mail account and usually receive quite important and confidential e-mails related to business and friends. I know the fact that Outlook maintains a single file called PST to store all e-mails and other items, but never thought of taking backup as I had full faith in the reliability of my computer.

Then one day, my boss told me that I needed to go for a business trip to finalize a deal with one of our client for some weeks. But before leaving, I wanted to ensure the privacy of my Outlook e-mails. Thus I spent a complete day to search for the solution and finally discovered that Microsoft Outlook allows setting a password for its PST that can act as a safety measure against unauthorized access. I followed the described steps and defined a 20 character long password. Just to ensure more safety, I used various special characters too.

My biggest mistake was that I didn't write this password anywhere as I had much confidence on my memory. After I returned and started Outlook to access the e-mails, it asked for a password. But unfortunately, I could get it as I forgot the one. I tried hard but couldn't succeed. This was a critical data loss for me as I wanted my e-mails at any cost.

At last, I searched on Google and found two main options to deal with such problems: pst19upg.exe and third-party Password Recovery utilities. Since pst19upg.exe is a freeware, I chose it first and used it on the backup of my PST, but it didn't work. Finally I used Stellar Phoenix Outlook Password Recovery and it easily recovered my Lost PST Password within couple of clicks. The PST Password Recovery software gave 6 PST passwords, each of which was usable to open the file.

The product is easy to use and supports MS Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000.The tool also supports the latest Windows 7, which I found the most striking feature. You just need to specify the file path and the Password Recovery softwarewill generate a series of passwords for you.