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I need to recover some mails from a backed up OST file. Unfortunately, I deleted the corresponding IMAP mail account from Outlook. When I recreate the mail account and replace the created OST file with my backup I get the following error message:

The file {path}.ost cannot be accessed because it has been configured for use with a different mailbox.

How to solve this problem?

Please don't suggest a OST to PST tool unless you know it works. I tried numerous of those tools from dubious looking websites and none worked.

Please note: I am using Outlook 2013 Preview.

Daniel Hilgarth
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2 Answers2

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Unfortunately, there is no native way to recover the email. OSTs are linked to the account (and as you found out, account instance) that spawned them. Recovery is possible, but you will have to go to third party tools to get that. As this is a non-released version of Outlook, your luck there will likely be less than it would be if the Outlook version were released.

My company deals with OST reading as part of our line-of-business, and it is a very tricky problem.

Recommending a third party tool is out-of-scope of this site (and Stack Exchange generally).

sysadmin1138
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  • Thanks for your answer. Is it somehow possible to recover the account instance? I backup my hard disk regularly, the chances are high that the file containing the account info is in the backup. But I don't know where to look for that file... – Daniel Hilgarth Oct 16 '12 at 18:42
  • @DanielHilgarth It would be a group of registry settings, as I understand it, and I'm not sure which ones. – sysadmin1138 Oct 16 '12 at 19:03
  • :-( Do you have any other idea? – Daniel Hilgarth Oct 16 '12 at 19:41
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OST files are only a cache of the email stored on the mail server. You should just be able to setup a new Outlook profile and let it make a new OST file and it will download all of your email again.

That being said, as of this writing we have found that Outlook 2013 IMAP system is not very stable even in the RTM version with all updates as of today. You could set up any other email client software with the same IMAP account and have all of your email download in to that client instead of using Outlook 2013.

BeowulfNode42
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