It will be interesting to see if a trend develops there. Don’t waste time with a jumble of PST files and provide your company with lasting protection from data loss. MailStore allows you to easily back up PST files in a central archive. The fact that Microsoft decided to make them open source is an intriguing factor as well. PST files are prone to data loss or corruption, have a huge impact on storage and backup and can be a nightmare to search, e.g. IT professionals have been groaning about managing PST files for years (as this quick TechRepublic search shows), so I'm sure any help in dealing with PST files will be welcomed by IT. It's also difficult to browse and search those PST, and you're mostly limited to Outlook and Windows Desktop Search as ways to access them.

PST files have been a pain point for IT because they once they get too big they become unstable and so some heavy email users will often end up juggling multiple PST files (a new one every year, for example). As a result, most corporate users are encouraged to regularly archive their inboxes. It's necessary because when the mailboxes get too big they can take too long for users to load and can also clog up the Exchange servers. Microsoft also decided to make both tools open source in order to allow the IT community to extend them even further.ĭealing with mail quotas has long been the biggest headache of using Microsoft Outlook with a Microsoft Exchange mailbox.

To help IT departments and corporate users better manage PST files, Microsoft has released two new tools that will allow developers and third-party utilities to access and manipulate the data inside of PST mail archive folders.