Using Hex Editor To Perform Email Recovery

Have you ever come across a situation when you deleted an important email accidentally or a virus attack has resulted in data loss? If you believe that retrieving those important emails is not possible, then don’t get disheartened, you can easily recover your deleted, damaged or inaccessible emails. As we all know the fact, that emails have become an integral part of our business lives and play a vital role in a significant amount of work that is carried out at office. There are significant files and photos attached to them, which are vital and if in case they get deleted, this might result in severe loss. Email data becomes even more important if you are directly dealing with your clients and carrying out business deals through them.

Outlook PST file is the only copy of your emails, notes, contacts, calendars, archives, appointments, etc when you are not accessing Exchange Server account. Hence, email recovery is an important topic to be considered, if user deletes these useful items accidentally or intentionally. On the other hand, if Outlook is configured to utilize an Exchange account, administrator has the power to access all those deleted emails. Even in situations when users purge the emails, the administrator side can recover them through Exchange journaling and archiving. But the situation becomes dicey in case user is working on an account such as POP3. If the user deletes the PST email items permanently using Shift + Delete key or empties the Deleted Items folder, the solutions can be different; yet in that case too email recovery is possible.

Deleted items recovery from Outlook PST is possible. At times, when you don’t have an updated backup to perform email recovery, a hex editor might work. These programs are usually available as freeware and allow you to manipulate the binary computer files and edit the raw file contents. Subsequently, you can easily use these tools to make required changes in any file. Technique of recovering deleted PST items is started using Hex editor to corrupt the file and later repair it. But before, you do it, ensure that you have a backup file for the same. If you have already compacted the PST and if the deleted item space has been occupied, then the process might fail. In order to perform email recovery using hex editor, follow the steps given below:

1. Open the PST file with a hex editor.

2. Change the first eight bits of file ‘00’ etc.

3. Launch Outlook to view the PST file. Outlook will no longer recognize the file and state it as corrupt.

4. Access Scanpst.exe file to start Inbox Repair Tool and repair corrupt PST file.

5. When you repair the corrupt PST, Scanpst.exe tool will recreate all the pointers and hence, the email items that you deleted get restored to their original location.

If you are not comfortable with this idea, then the only other option left is to use a third party Email Recovery software to recover deleted PST items. There are huge range of email recovery utilities developed to scan affected PST to restore deleted emails, notes, calendars and other items. Such tools enable you to perform recovery without taking too much of time. You can try out demo version to experience how effective the selected tool is for you. An email recovery tool can be installed on any version of Windows operating system to recover deleted emails.