Looking for safe ways to get email exported from Outlook.

[soho1]

Hi guys and gals,

I am looking for a utility or SAFE and RELIABLE way to export emails from outlook as part of a backup strategy.

For those of you with patience, please read my entire post before responding. THANKS VERY MUCH!

Urgency: Some. Outlook is complaining that my OST is out of date for some reason (perhaps one of my accounts has been updated as I my Office 365 cloud services are being upgraded). The exact message in my local machine Outlook 2010 is "Outlook is using an old copy of your Outlook datafile (.ost). Exit Outlook, delete the file, and restart Outlook. A new file will automatically be created the next time you initiate a send/receive."

This makes me nervous in various ways.
1) It's Microsoft. Sorry guys, but with over 20 years of using your software, your automatic updates, even with Windows Updates, have had a failure rate WAY TOO HIGH for me.
2) It's Microsoft. You are too cavalier with MY DATA, offering no suggested backup and mitegation strategy in advance of the the delete.
3) I use Microsoft too extensively and over ambitiously. My OST is the file store for more than one Exchange account and several POP accounts and have hundreds, if not thousands of email records I use for historical reference.

As to backups, I regularly backup my OST and PST files as part of my backup plan. But if one verified backup is good, two or three is better. And various forms is better yet.

So, yes, I can copy my emails to another OST. However, recently i tried doing that with a MOVE instead of a copy, and came back hours later to an empty mailbox and an PST that was empty. Haven't seen that before, but hey, I'm familiar with Murphy's Law and thus, I am here.

Finally, I am somewhat enchanted by the notion of copying out to a folder. What would make this USEFUL is if the timestamps of the the email folder items actually matched the date on the email instead of just the creation time from the export. So, in particular, I would love to find a utility to copy them out and update the folder file timestamps as it happened.

I have seen a few utilities in various places, but you all are the best of the best, so your suggestions are much appreciated. I would also be glad to buy a coffee, ship a donut or make a donation on behalf of great answer. Thanks in advance for answers and suggestions.

 

[Kari]

As the Outlook .ost file only contains messages of an Exchange ActiveSync account for offline use, it's completely safe to delete it. Be sure Outlook is completely closed when doing this. Next time when Outlook is launched and it's online it reads the messages from your Exchange ActiveSync account again and creates a new .ost file.

Kari

 

[soho1]

Hi, you are right, that it should be safe, but a few points to consider:

1) I have no idea which of several OST files outlook might be complaining about. This infers I should delete them all.
2) Some of these accounts are no longer "live", meaning my offline records in the OST will be lost when I delete the OST file(s), at least for the exchange accounts which are no longer active.
3) I'd still like to be able to export these messages into alternative data stores (e.g. directory, with messages as files, but with timestamps on files or other NTFS date and email fields that are represetnative of the indifividual email message.

Thanks though.

 

[Ranger4]

I don't know if this is any help, but when I get an email that is important I save it to "OneNote" which you can do from inside Outlook. The email gets saved there in its original format.