How to open password-protected Outlook PST files?

The PST file is used to store e-mail messages, calendar events, tasks and other information within Microsoft Outlook. By using password protection feature, you can protect the contents of a sensitive and crucial PST file and prevent any kind of invasion. Things become serious when you cannot recall the password set to your PST file and all you important information becomes inaccessible. Such issues can be easily handled provided you have an appropriate and reliable pst password recovery application. These utilities help you recover PST password by applying intelligent scanning algorithms. The details of how it is done can be found in the later part of this article.

Let's consider a practical scenario, wherein, you have an archive PST file which stores information and communications regarding a pending business deal. To safeguard its content from unauthorized people, you decide to set a password to it. One fine day when you try to open this less-used PST file to fetch some data, you just cannot punch in the correct password. You try to type the correct password but fail. Since you cannot afford to work on the pending agreement without gathering information from the archive PST file, it has become quite important for you to recover pst password.

What to be done?

PST password if gets lost or forgotten can be retrieved easily. Yes, you read it right. To elaborate this, I would like to share how actually a PST password is set. When you set a password to a PST file, Microsoft Outlook stores the CRC32 hash value of the original password instead of saving it as it is. Now, when you try to open a password-protected PST file, Outlook verifies the hash value stored into it . If the hash value is found to be 0, your PST file will be opened. This implies that you can use another set of passwords which create the same CRC value.

The above principle or the weak link in PST password protection has paved the way for pst password recovery software. In order to crack the PST password, all you have to do is get the CRC hash value and decode it to get a usable password. This can be easily done by using a professional software.

A reliable application which generates various usable PST passwords is Stellar Phoenix Outlook Password Recovery. The software helps you recover lost or forgotten PST passwords without any risk. Being read-only it doesn't dilute the content or original information stored in a PST file. You can use this application to recover pst password for the following Outlook versions including Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000.