Protecting a personal folder (PST file) with a password gives you an efficient way to prevent unauthorized access. It typically proves beneficial when your system is logged onto by several users and you maintain confidential information in your PST file. Other users accessing a password protected PST receive a prompt to enter a password.

You, as the owner of PST file, can enter the correct PST password and click to select ‘Save this password in your password list’. PST can be password protected at the time of creating it or at a later time. While adding a PST file in your Outlook configuration, you can simply mention a PST password and add it to the password list. However, to apply a password for an already existing PST, you can use its ‘Advanced’ settings option. But if lose this password, the recommended option that can be availed is PST Password Recovery solutions.

How you lose your PST password?

Consider a situation, you start Microsoft Outlook and try to open your password-protected PST file. The password dialog appears and you enter the password. But Outlook doesn’t accept the password and doesn’t allow you to access its contents. You get an error that is similar to:

"The password you have typed is incorrect. Retype the password."

This behavior might occur if one of the conditions is true:

1-You are entering an incorrect PST password. You might have forgotten it
2-PST password is damaged. It might occur due to system crash like reasons

PST passwords cannot be reset if lost once. So, you can either remove it or recover it using commercial Outlook Password Recovery applications.

Removing PST Password

A utility called pst19upg.exe is the tool that Microsoft provides to upgrade PST files. But as one of its major drawback, you can remove the password from a PST file (for which you have forgotten or damaged password). When you use this tool to upgrade your PST file, it upgrades it but doesn’t retain its password anymore.

The tool requires that you have a minimum of three times free disk space as the size of original PST file. In addition, you also require scanpst.exe to check file consistency after using pst19upg.exe. You must backup the PST file before running this PST upgrade tool as it might corrupt the file. Also, you need to verify the file consistency by running scanpst.exe. After this, you can follow these steps:

1-Open the command prompt
2-Type ‘pst19upg.exe -x filename’s’ (filename’s is the name of PST file)
3-You will get a new file with .psx extension but with same name. You can rename the original file.
4-To change the format of this new file to .pst, type ‘pst19upg.exe -i filename’s’
5-Use scanpst.exe tool to check this PST file for errors

Recovering PST Password

The encryption of PST password is very weak. Outlook uses CRC32 algorithm (actually with little modification) to create a 32-bit hash value that represents the actual PST password. Though CRC32 is a famous algorithm used for verifying data integrity, but when it comes to passwords, it falls short of maintaining their integrity.

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