Extraction of messages from Outlook 97 .pst archive file

[Theodore Stathopoulos]

Dear friends,

No matter how strange or unbelievable it may seem to you, I have been using
Microsoft Office 97 since the day it was released and for 13 years until now.
It worked fine both on my old computer running Windows 95 OSR 2 as well as on
my new computer running Windows XP Professional SP3.

However, a few days ago, I formatted my hard disk, installed Windows XP
Professional SP3 from scratch and instead of the outdated Office 97, I
downloaded and installed Microsoft Office 2010 Beta which works fine.

The problem now is that I have an Outlook 97 archive Message.pst file which
contains very important messages I do need for my work and I tried to extract
the files by trying both to either open or import it into Outlook 2010 but,
unfortunately, the only thing that happened was that an empty folder called
"Messages" was created in Microsoft Outlook 2010.

Unfortunately, for some reason which is unknown to me, the messages
contained in the archive file cannot be extracted in this way. Is is probably
just because Outlook 97 is so old compared to Outlook 2010 that importing or
opening its archive .pst files into Outlook 2010 is not supported? I wonder.
And most important: How could I extract the messages from this Outlook 97
..pst file?

It should be noted that I have the Microsoft Office 97 installation CD-ROM
and I am now thinking that a possible solution might be to also install
Outlook 97 on my system and use it to only extract the messages but, on the
other hand, I am not sure that this installation will not cause any damage to
the properly functioning Outlook 2010 and therefore I am afraid to do so
unless someone who knows the matter much better than me can assure me that
there will be no problems.

And anyway, in which other ways, especially if the additional installation
of Outlook 97 is not safe for my system, would it be possible to have these
important messages extracted from this Outlook 97 archive .pst file?

Please help!

 

[DL]

The pst file need to be located on the hard disk (Documents folder) then
within Outlook you open it
If that produces any err msg, what is the msg?

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

No matter how strange or unbelievable it may seem to you, I have been using
Microsoft Office 97 since the day it was released and for 13 years until
now.
It worked fine both on my old computer running Windows 95 OSR 2 as well as
on
my new computer running Windows XP Professional SP3.

It would be a rare mail service provider that works with Outlook 97. Most
mail service providers require authentication to the outgoing mail server and
Outlook 97 simply can't do that. Perhaps you were using Outlook 97 for
everything but email or, I supposed, your mail service provider could be one
of the very few remaining that doesn't require outgoing server authentication.

However, a few days ago, I formatted my hard disk, installed Windows XP
Professional SP3 from scratch and instead of the outdated Office 97, I
downloaded and installed Microsoft Office 2010 Beta which works fine.

The problem now is that I have an Outlook 97 archive Message.pst file which
contains very important messages I do need for my work and I tried to
extract
the files by trying both to either open or import it into Outlook 2010 but,
unfortunately, the only thing that happened was that an empty folder called
"Messages" was created in Microsoft Outlook 2010.

This can't possibly be true. First, installing Outlook 2010 will not change
the content of any PST. If the PST is not referenced by a mail profile,
Outlok can't even know it exists. Second, Outlook doesn't create folders
named "Messages" automatically. Are you leaving details out of your
description?

Unfortunately, for some reason which is unknown to me, the messages
contained in the archive file cannot be extracted in this way. Is is
probably
just because Outlook 97 is so old compared to Outlook 2010 that importing or
opening its archive .pst files into Outlook 2010 is not supported? I wonder.
And most important: How could I extract the messages from this Outlook 97
.pst file?

Outlook 2010 has no problem I can see opening PSTs created by Outlook 97.
Select the Backstage and open the PST there. That's all you need to do. All
the data in the PST will be available to you exact as it was in Outlok 97.

It should be noted that I have the Microsoft Office 97 installation CD-ROM
and I am now thinking that a possible solution might be to also install
Outlook 97 on my system and use it to only extract the messages but, on the
other hand, I am not sure that this installation will not cause any damage
to
the properly functioning Outlook 2010 and therefore I am afraid to do so
unless someone who knows the matter much better than me can assure me that
there will be no problems.

You cannot have more than one version of Outlook installed.

 

[Theodore Stathopoulos]

Hello again!

I had been using Outlook 97 without problems almost exclusively for sending
and receiving e-mail and had

never had any outgoing mail server authentication problems. My mail service
is, by the way, provided to me

through the AT&T Global Network and it seems that AT&T is one of the very
few still remaining Internet

Service Providers whose outgoing mail server does not require e-mail client
authentication.

That's exactly what I do! I go to the backstage of Office 2010 by clicking
the file tab. I then click Open

and subsequently Open an Outlook Data File (.pst) in order to open the
Outlook 97 Messages.pst archive

file. However, when I select this .pst file and click the Open button in the
Open Outlook Data File

dialogue box, the following message pops up:

"You are about to add a non-Unicode capable store to your profile. This
store should not be used to store

multilingual Unicode data. Do you want to continue?"

I click OK and then an account bearing the name of the .pst file, in this
particular case Messages, is

created in Outlook 2010 but it contains only an empty "Deleted" folder and
the messages of the Outlook 97

Messages.pst archive file for some unknown reason fail to be extracted.

Is there anything I can do to extract the messages?

I should finally also note here that my Outlook 97 was part of the Greek
language version of Office 97.

I would greatly appreciate a quick reply.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

I had been using Outlook 97 without problems almost exclusively for sending
and receiving e-mail and had never had any outgoing mail server
authentication problems.
My mail service is, by the way, provided to me through the AT&T Global
Network and it
seems that AT&T is one of the very few still remaining Internet Service
Providers whose
outgoing mail server does not require e-mail client authentication.

For most of its mail services, AT&T uses Yahoo. You are lucky.

That's exactly what I do! I go to the backstage of Office 2010 by clicking
the file tab. I then click Open and subsequently Open an Outlook Data File
(.pst) in order
to open the Outlook 97 Messages.pst archive file.

Are you using the main PST from Outlook 97 or an archive PST? It makes a
difference.

However, when I select this .pst file and
click the Open button in the Open Outlook Data File dialogue box, the
following message
pops up:

"You are about to add a non-Unicode capable store to your profile. This
store should not be used to store multilingual Unicode data. Do you want to
continue?"

This is perfectly normal.

I click OK and then an account bearing the name of the .pst file, in this
particular case Messages, is created in Outlook 2010 but it contains only an
empty
"Deleted" folder and the messages of the Outlook 97 Messages.pst archive
file for some
unknown reason fail to be extracted.

No account bearing the name of the PST gets created. Instead, you see the
display name of the root of the PST appearing in the Navigation Pane. That's
not an account.

Is there anything I can do to extract the messages?

I should finally also note here that my Outlook 97 was part of the Greek
language version of Office 97.

I would greatly appreciate a quick reply.

Make sure you're opening the correct PST. Outlok 2010 can read an ANSI PST
from Outlook 97 and you should be seeing all the data it contains. When you
have added it to Outlook 2010, you can convert it to a Unicode PST by
following the steps here: http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ansi-to-unicode.asp

Keep in mind that the currently available Outlook 2010 is still an evaluation
copy and it will expire within the next year so unless you have a copy of
Outlook 2003 or later, you won't be able to open any of the PSTs you create
with it.

 

[Theodore Stathopoulos]

Yes, it is an Outlook 97 .pst archive file and includes about 100 e-mail
messages which was the content of my Outlook 97 Inbox and which I archived
before I carry out my hard disk formatting and recovery process and now I
cannot extract because this archive .pst file can neither open or be imported
into the Outlook 2010 Beta version.

Oh my God! What shall I do now?

As for the Office 2010 Beta version that I have installed, thank you for you
advice but I will buy the Office 2010 retail version as soon as it is
released.

Best regards from Greece!

 

[Gordon]

Yes, it is an Outlook 97 .pst archive file and includes about 100 e-mail
messages which was the content of my Outlook 97 Inbox and which I archived
before I carry out my hard disk formatting and recovery process and now I
cannot extract because this archive .pst file can neither open or be
imported

Why not? What happens when you try? Any error message?

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

Yes, it is an Outlook 97 .pst archive file and includes about 100 e-mail
messages which was the content of my Outlook 97 Inbox and which I archived
before I carry out my hard disk formatting and recovery process and now I
cannot extract because this archive .pst file can neither open or be
imported
into the Outlook 2010 Beta version.

If you're speaking of "archiving" using Outlook's definitions, archiving in no
way constitutes a backup or even a faithful copy of your default PST.
Somethere along the way you used a method of transporting your data that
damaged the PST in such a way as to make it unusable. Since we don't know
exactly what you did, there's no good way to say what, but it doesn't really
matter anyway, since it's after the fact. Making a backup is useless unless
you can restore that backup. Always perform a restore to see if your backup
is faithful before trusting it so completely.

Oh my God! What shall I do now?

I think you're screwed. Sorry.

 

[Theodore Stathopoulos]

As I have already written above, before the formatting and recovery of my
hard disk, I archived the

content of my Outlook 97 Inbox, which was a total of about 100 e-mail
messages that I had received, and

the result of this archiving process was the Messages.pst file.

All I did was that I subsequently copied this .pst archive file to a CD-RW
and after the recovery of my

system I copied it again from the CD-RW back to my hard drive, installed the
Office 2010 Beta version and

unsuccessfully tried both to either open or import it into the Beta version
of Outlook 2010.

From what you say and according to the fact that "archiving" in Outlook's
definition is not a back-up, I

now strongly believe that copying this Messages.pst archive file from my
hard disk to the CD-RW and back

again to my hard disk after the system recovery is what damaged the messages
included in this file and

cannot be extracted.

What do you think about it? Do you agree that this is an explanation for the
cause of the damage?

Regards!

 

[Gordon]

All I did was that I subsequently copied this .pst archive file to a CD-RW
and after the recovery of my

system I copied it again from the CD-RW back to my hard drive, installed
the
Office 2010 Beta version and

unsuccessfully tried both to either open or import it into the Beta
version
of Outlook 2010.

So what happened when you tried? Any error message?

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

As I have already written above, before the formatting and recovery of my
hard disk, I archived the
content of my Outlook 97 Inbox,

Exactly what do you mean by this? Describe the exact process you used.

 

[Theodore Stathopoulos]

What I can remember is that I archived the messages of my Outlook 97 Inbox by
using the Archive command in the File menu of Outlook 97 but it seems that I
made a mistake without realising it... I don't know...
Because today I ran the Scanpst.exe tool that can be found in the
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office 14" folder and found out that the
Messages.pst archive file had a lot of errors which were repaired.

Then, I downloaded, installed and used the trial version of Outlook Recovery
Toolbox. This is a piece of software that repairs, reads and extracts, among
others, Outlook 97 .pst files and I was very badly surprised to see that
there was no Inbox folder with e-mail messages contained in the Messages.pst
file but only an empty Deleted and Tasks folder which were properly created
in Outlook 2010 as well as the Journal folder which was full but anyway
cannot be extracted as it is not supported by Outlook 2010.

I can now realise that I made a mistake when I carried out the archiving
process and instead of my Inbox I archived the empty Deleted and Tasks folder
as well as the Journal folder.

There is no other explanation and after this I think that the problem has to
be considered solved.

There was actually no problem but my own silly mistake. This is quite often
the result of a rush job done under pressure and I really feel awfully sorry
for any possible headache I have caused to you and thank you very much for
all your due attention and communication.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

I can now realise that I made a mistake when I carried out the archiving
process and instead of my Inbox I archived the empty Deleted and Tasks
folder
as well as the Journal folder.

Sorry to hear that. It's always a bite when you discover after the fact that
you didn't save what you thought you were saving.

There is no other explanation and after this I think that the problem has to
be considered solved.

Going forward, make sure you make frequent backups to avoid this issue.
http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/backupandrestore.htm