Outlook: how to view the content of a pst file

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As explained in one of my previous posts, it is highly recomended to perform maintenance on your Exchange Server. Using tools like ExMerge, you can archive old mails or mails for closed mailboxes and thus reduce storage size. But what happens when we need to view the content of the resulting PST file?
First of all, we can always open the PST with Outlook. However we can use a separate tool to achieve that: Outlook PST Viewer.

The software is very simple to use and completely free.

• View PST files without having MS Outlook installed.
• Open & view password protected .pst files without a password.
• View Outlook messages, OLE embedded objects without MAPI or Outlook.
• View PST files with exact email formatting.
• View PST files & restore all its meta data like To, Cc, Bcc, From, Sent & Received date.
• Reads PST files and extracts all MAPI properties.
• View PST files with Internet header.
• Software recovers Rich Text, HTML or Text formatting of emails stored in PST files.

Because it is free, you can always give it a try. Download it here.

Exchange: the recovery storage group

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Today we are talking about retro-software... As many of you are already using Exchange 2010, you might not be interested in the information given in this post. In fact the Recovery Storage Group has been removed from the Microsoft famous email server starting from the 2010 version.
Anyway, if you are sticking with a previous release then I believe you should - at least - know something about recovering mailboxes from a backup. In my experience, whenever I knew about a possible disaster recovery solution, the disastrous situations never occurred. It's like a protective talisman!
So, here we are. Read this post and take it as an amulet, protecting you from disastrous situations!

What is the Recovery Storage Group?

The Recovery Storage Group (RSG) is a storage group (!) that can be used to mount a backed-up copy of a mailbox store in your Exchange environment.
Typical situation:
1) Your Exchange is working and should continue to work;
2) You need to recover a deleted mailbox or single email;
3) You do have a back-up copy of the mailbox store;
4) You need to recover that back-up and put it in a safe position to extract mails with ExMerge.
Confused? You shouldn't, because the operation is quite easy - even if could be quite time consuming.

Exchange server: ExMerge

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When dealing with Ms Exchange Server, you don't always find a ready solution to problems. One of the most useful application you might need is ExMerge (Microsoft Exchange Server Mailbox Merge Wizard).
ExMerge is a small program that you might not use for months, but it's worth knowing how to use it before things go wrong.
It can extract data from mailboxes on your server for backup or maintenance purposes. I actually use it when someone leaves the company: after a while, I extract all the mailbox folders and save them as a .pst file, then delete all the items and close the user account.