Being working for several years I have many a times experienced loss of emails due to accidental deletions, damage of emails in transit or because of exchange server corruptions. This situation used to create panic in the organization and the first question to arise was – Now what to do?

There are number of PST recovery tools available in the market but how good it would be if one could recover the lost emails by himself by just following simple steps with the help of MS Outlook itself.

The emails which were regularly backed up could be retrieved back easily but there was no option to get back the unsaved mails until we discovered some easy steps to recover and restore back the lost emails. The mails which get deleted are not truly lost, the operating system does not read them but it doesn’t means that they are not there. It only means that the emails file cannot be accessed by you.

Like various data recovery techniques, the in-built email recovery features can effectively recover the inaccessible email files of various email clients. Focusing on the widely used email client MS Outlook, I would share the steps to recover the deleted emails which have proved beneficial many times in my case.

MS Outlook Email Data Recovery

Generally it becomes tough to trace location of the .pst file. The Outlook (.pst) files get stored at a default location from where you can view these files. The .pst file stored here contains all the sent and received mails by the user. If the mails get corrupt or damaged, the particular file from this location should be selected for recovery. The default location is:

"C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook"

Note: The 'User Name' is filled with the name of your computer system.

1. Launch Microsoft Outlook.

2. Click the File menu and select Import and Export option.

3. Import and Export Wizard dialog box will be displayed. Select the Import from another Program file option.

4. Click Next. The window to select the file type to be imported will be displayed.

5. Select the Personal Folder File (.pst) option and click Next.

6. The Import Personal Folder screen will be displayed, browse the file to be imported and select the Replace Duplicate boxes with items imported option. This selection replaces the duplicate items that are imported.

7. Click Next. The window to define the location of the recovered .pst files appears.

8. Click Finish when the recovery process gets completed.

These are the simple steps to restore and recover the lost and inaccessible emails of MS Outlook. Talking in terms of saving the important emails, regular backups should be performed to provide protection to our valuable mails and data in fact to avoid situations of data loss.