Restoring Data from an OST after Deleting the Mailbox

A person using MS Outlook must be most probably using, MS Exchange Server for email account. MS Outlook and Exchange Server together is a great combination for online and offline messaging support. MS Outlook also supports accessing Hotmail account messages.

 

No email server can be certified as the best one. But popularity of Exchange and MS Outlook gives them an edge over others. MS Outlook serves as the mail-client that supports storing tasks, events, notes, journals, mails and addresses. It allows working offline by help of OST (offline storage) files. OST files, when online, are an exact duplicate of the user mailbox on Exchange server. OST files can be considered as slave replicas of the server- based folders. If the mailbox at server is deleted accidentally or intentionally, the OST file gets orphaned.

 

MS Exchange Server mailbox can be recovered by help of the offline OST file. You can move the messages from the OST to a PST file and use the PST file to export mail items to the Exchange. However this can be true only if the old profile in the Outlook is not changed.  

 

Mailbox Recovery Procedure

We will discuss steps to recover mailbox if the user’s profile that was used to create the OST file is not changed or deleted. Whenever a new OST file is created for any other mailbox, the old one may be lost. This is actually a security mechanism of MS Exchange Server so that Windows password can not be used for working offline.  You can only log one to Outlook using the exchange login account. For this, an encrypted cookie is created from the unique ID of Exchange server mailbox and stored on client’s computer. The key is verified each time MS Outlook is opened in offline mode.

Whenever the Outlook profile is changed or the user tries to connect to some other mailbox of MS Exchange Server, the old key is replaced by a new key. If this happens, the old Offline mails can not be accessed again.

If the user had not changed the profile or had not connected to any other mailbox, the deleted mailbox can be recovered back effectively using the underlying steps. There are two ways: either to recover the mailbox of Exchange server or else convert the OST file to PST and then open it in MS Outlook or export it to Exchange Server.

To recover the mailbox,

1. Create a new mailbox in MS Exchange.
   
2. Connect it to the MS Outlook account.
   
3. Once connected all the mail-items in the OST file will get transferred to the Exchange Server.
4. Rename the mailbox to the deleted one.
   
5. Close MS Outlook. Start MS Outlook.
   

You can also use a recommended OST to PST converter tool to convert the OST file to PST and use it to export the mail-items to Exchange Server database.