Reading an Outlook 2003 OST file

Question

I need to recover the contents of an OST file from Outlook 2003. I don't need to do this so badly that I'm willing to pay the hundreds of dollars some companies charge for recovery utilities; I'm more interested in doing this from the intellectual challenge side of things. Are there any recommended libraries for doing this? I'd prefer something in either C# or Java.

Geoponic

Answer 1

If you want to do it as an exercise you may want to write your own library.

• PST format specification
• Wiki article on PST and OST file formats
• lipff - opensource C library and tools to access the Personal Folder File (PFF) and the Offline Folder File (OFF) format. PFF is used in PAB (Personal Address Book), PST (Personal Storage Table) and OST (Offline Storage Table) files.
• PST file format SDK C++. Can read PST and OST files.

Decameter

really I can read Off-line Storage Table (.ost) files using C#, not C++? – Mv

Answer 2

I ran into the same problem. There seems to be a bunch of commercial tools, but I was only able to find one open source tool libpst. The (limited) documentation only talks about .pst files, but it worked like a charm on both .pst and .ost files for me (Outlook 2003, I believe).

I had a few issues compiling it. It couldn't seem to find the Python::Boost lib, but the following worked:

./configure --without-boost-python --disable-python && make

No need to rename the .ost file or convert it with scanpst.exe. Something like readpst -M outlook.ost will dump all your emails into files under the current dir.

Retract

Answer 3

Rename the .ost extension to .pst and run scanpst.exe in your Office installation directory. For versions prior to Outlook 2007 this will convert your OST to a PST.

Crownpiece

I remember this trick oh so long ago. Yeah, too bad it doesn't work for 2007 now. – Lignite

Answer 4

Maybe you could check Alioth LibPST. If you know C, you can probably go through the source code and make it do whatever you would like to do.

Lounging

I'll check that but it sounds like it's for reading PST files and my belief is that OST files have a different format. – Geoponic

I thought at one point OST and PST were the same. Are they different now? – Handgun

If they are, I may just be able to use libs on our MSDN discs at the office. – Geoponic

@Mv I didn't try. You can find help at their mailing list. lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libpst-devel – Lounging