Microsoft has designed MS outlook as an email client in order to manage the personal information. Apart from email messages, it includes calendars, task, contacts, notes, lists and various other items. The Outlook can be considered as the standalone application program which can work with different server for multiple users in a business. It also helps the users by guiding them to organize the information in a systematic manner. Further, the user can save personal text files with encryption to protect the data from undesired access.

To store the emails, contacts, address books and various other items, Outlook introduces PST or Personal Storage Table which is responsible of storing all the data associated with Outlook. PST files allow the users to have easy access to the Outlook data anytime. Users can put encryption mechanism and other security parameters like passwords to keep their data protected from unwanted access by outsiders. But the problem arises when you are not aware of the password and try to access encrypted PST file, the file becomes inaccessible forever. In our daily life, this kind of misfortune may await for us when you forget the password and need to access the mail in a hurry.

Apart from the above issue, there are several others when PST file gets inaccessible, lost or damaged which certainly needs extra care afterwards to retrieve the data. Consider such an example; you try to import a .pst file from a CD-ROM to your Outlook folders by using the Outlook Import and Export Wizard. In the Import dialog box, after you browse to the .pst file, the following error message may encounter on your screen:

Personal Folders:

Properties for this information service must be defined prior to use.

If you click OK, another error message may prompt

Microsoft Outlook:

File access is denied. You do not have permission required to access the file c:path_name.

If you again click OK, the Import dialog box is displayed, so that you can browse to the .pst file again.

This issue also occurs if you attempt to open a .pst file from a CD-ROM.

This kind of issue occurs because when you burn a file to a CD- ROM, the file is created with a read- only file attribute which can’t be changed on a CD- ROM. To resolve this issue, you may copy the .PST file from the CD- ROM and save it to hard disk or another storage media. You may then remove the read- only property of the file. To do so, just right click the file, click Properties, click to clear the Read Only check box and then click OK. The Import process is now finished successfully.

A .PST file is not dependent on specific version of Exchange Server or operating system. So, if you use a .PST file from a different version, it does not draw any impact on the Import process.

You may resolve the PST file inaccessibility issue through third party PST file recovery tools. Kernel for Outlook PST Repair is such a commercial tool that is specially designed to open PST file and perform Outlook 2010 recovery.