Accessing Outlook .pst files in New Outlook

Anonymous
2024-06-04T14:06:01+00:00

I have twenty years of history in various .pst files.  When I first started using Outlook, my single .pst file and all my folders got too large and I was instructed to move some of my folders into new .pst files.  These .pst files contain lots of important emails and historic records attached to emails.  So I filed all the emails into various folders within various .pst files. 

If Outlook will no longer support .pst files, how will I be able to access the .pst files?  I understand that Microsoft will no longer support “Old Outlook”.  So what can I now do to be able to access these various .pst files?  Should i go back to what I was doing originally and move everything from .pst files into folders within my "root" Outlook email? That would put about 4.5G of emails into my New Outlook. How will that work?

Outlook | Windows | New Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-06-29T17:49:44+00:00

    Just scanned backwards through this thread. Is the link still there? can you reply to me with it?

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-06-29T17:07:09+00:00

    PST support only went away for the free version.

    If you're paying for an Office365 subscription you still have and can access your local hard drive PST files so long as you do NOT switch to "New Outlook". When I did that it let me switch back and kept my local hard drive PST files intact and in my Outlook list.

    Another reason I didn't like the "New Outlook" is it wanted me to give the credentials to my non-MS email accounts so it could move them to the cloud. I have no desire to do that any more than I want to move PST files there.

    If you don't want to pay for the subscription you might investigate the post I did some time ago that had a link with alternatives to read past PST files.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-06-29T16:03:59+00:00

    I too am very worried about this. I cannot/will not let all my years of data in the cloud. I want it local on my internal NAS.

    How can I do this? is there any way outside of Microsoft that it can be accomplished now? I fear that with all the delays, its not going to happen and all my data will be locked or lost.

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-04-15T04:45:00+00:00

    OK so I've just started using new Outlook and if I was to import my email archives ie pst files in order to do a search, I would have 32GB of data in my new Outlook which is silly. What I would have to do is import each archive separately and then delete same but it's not clear how I do that? Equally, my emails are archived within each pst file in different folders. Are the folders preserved when I import them?

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-04-05T14:37:50+00:00

    I have avoided converting to New Outlook specifically because it won't support my years' of PST files.

    I was dismayed this morning on opening Outlook that it prompted me again to switch to New Outlook and then told me something like:
    "If you avoid the switch now, you will automatically be switched the next time you start Outlook."

    After reading much of this thread I did a search (in Firefox using DuckDuckGo):
    "is there something other than outlook that can read pst files"

    That returned various hits including one at Coolutils Converter Blog titled
    "8 Best Ways to Open a PST File Without Outlook in 2024"
    The link to that is: https://www.coolutils.com/blog/ways-to-open-pst-file-without-outlook/

    I haven't tried any of the methods there yet but figured I'd share it here for others.

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