How Can I Change Dates on Old Outlook Messages

[Cronstedt31]

My company has always had a records retention policy that is simply ignored
by the vast majority of employees. With a few exceptions, the retention
period for general business correspondence including email, is three years. I
frequently refer back to emails that are more than three years old to help
with new issues or to continue work on projects that are more than three
years old so I don't want to delete all my emails that are out of the records
retention guidelines. In the past, this was no problem, since to keep my old
emails around, all I had to do was ignore the guidelines and not delete
anything.

The company has thousands of Lenovo T60 laptop computers that are all
identical and run Outlook 2003 (11.8118.8132) SP2. They have modified these
computers to include lots of company specific background software that forces
certain bureacratic things to happen such as document labeling guidelines,
security updates, document backups. Some of these are good things but, from
my point of view, many are bad. Now, the insidious records retention
department is implementing a new tool that will automatically search our
Microsoft Outlook .pst files and delete all messages that were created/sent
more than three years ago.

As you likely know, email messages are not stored as individual files as are
other microsoft Office documents. Rather, all the email in any given Outlook
data file is stored in a single (often HUGE) .pst file. Clearly, our records
retention "police" have some kind of software tool that examines the .pst
file(s) and deletes any emails inside the .pst file that were created or sent
more than three years ago. This will be implemented in the next month or so.
I hate this and want to prevent it from happening to my email.

So what I was wondering is whether any of you know of a software tool
(preferably free, shareware, or with a free trial period) that will change
the various dates of all the individual emails inside a given .pst file?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Barring the existance of such a program, do you have any other good ideas
for how to circumvent this new attack on my needed emails?

Regards,

Cronstedt31

 

[JoeO]

To give old email a current date, just forward it to yourself; the
(original) old email still exists and will be deleted under your company's
retention policy, but you will have a new copy to keep and reference.

 

[Cronstedt31]

JoeO, Thanks for the idea. That would work well if there were just a few
such emails. However, I have thousands and thousands of emails that I might
need and I don't want to have to go through each of these and select which
ones to keep and forward. This would take a long long time. While having
thousands seems awkward, they are easily searchable using the Google search
or other search tools. I need to either forward them all or re-date the
current ones. Any ideas on how to do either of these things and, preferably,
the latter? Thanks.

Regards,

Cronstedt31

 

[JoeO]

Cronsted31 -- Neil154 posted the following to my question, but it was
intended for you:

"First of all I want to let you be aware of something that you are probably
well aware of.

The purpose of the email deletion policy is to protect the company from
having old email around which could potentially have information harmful to
the company which could be obtained throygh legal action by lawyers.

That being said, if you have the possibility of creating a new pst file then
just copy the emails to the new file. I would guess that the routine your
company created only searches the default pst file. If not make a pst file

 

[neil154]

First let me mention the obvious: Your company has implemented this policy
to reduce their potential legal problems from information that might be in
these old emails. That being said if you can make a pst file on that machine
just copy the emails to the new pst file. The company procedure to erase old
emails probably only works on the default pst file. Another option would be
to create a pst file on a thumb drive or other external drive.

 

[jimmuh]

You can convert message stores in Outlook into collections of individual .msg
(or other) individual files, and this can be done in batches. There are
utilities and scripts for doing this. You could also just export the data,
either into .pst form (as suggested previously) or some other convenient form.

You might look at slipstick.com for more information. You'll have to do some
research to find the method best suited to your needs. If you don't have
admin rights on your system, then you probably won't be able to install a
utility (or perhaps even a script) for doing the conversion. In that case,
you're pretty much stuck with exporting the data or making a copy of the .pst
file.