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
    2025-03-25T11:08:50+00:00

    Forgive me if these questions have been answered about New Outlook but I've not been able to get them clear in my own mind:

    1. Is using POP to be discontinued?
    2. If so, will only IMAP be supported or is there a different protocol?
    3. I do not want my emails hosted on a remote server/cloud but stored locally (only) - is this possible?
    4. If so, and PSTs are no longer natively supported, where and how will local storage be possible?

    For context, New Outlook started for me after a reinstall of Windows 11 but I could download the standalone Classic version and am using that again (note I have a full 365 subscription). Like many people here I have a PST holding emails going back several years (personal and business) but my interest is not just retrospective but also looking to how I can manage things as I want into the future.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-03-25T11:54:56+00:00

    BlennerHasset - I can’t answer all questions but I can tell you that I am a subscriber to Microsoft 365. I have been able to download the classic Outlook. But I had to go find it separately and download it separately not as a part of any Microsoft 365 installation. My PST files at present are on my device. I am not certain how things are going to evolve.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-03-25T20:39:11+00:00

    Hi blennerhaset

    Short answer is no, you cannot have a pst file or POP3 account in new outlook. I have tried, you can try to set it up using the qdvanced settings when selecting new accounts, click cancel when it tries to auto negotiate with an email server.

    You have to use outlook classic for pst/pop3 accounts and the new outlook for imap only. There is nothing microhard are doing about it and they dont care about us, maybe back in windows 3.1 days they may have cared about us, but now we are force fed.

    Milan

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-03-27T21:17:18+00:00

    Eben

    Unfortunately this results in an "unknonw error" when attempting to move messages to / from archive PST files.

    This will become a major showstopper and will need to move to ZOHO, VNC or something other than Microsoft - with >20 years of emails that will need to be able to access. It's untenable to put these back into the root as one of your suggested remedies - so would respectfully suggest to inform dev team that they need to figure out a way to bridge and maintain continuity.

    Thanks for trying though.

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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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