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TL;DR

  • I exported a users .pst file from exchange server 2008R2

  • He moved to a new machine, and his old machine was toast, so it's gone, and unreachable

  • On his new machine, when I imported the .pst file, he noticed that he only has emails going back to a fairly recent date.

  • Is it possible that he archived the emails before that date (he doesn't remember, and wouldn't know if someone else did it for him), and they were removed from the .pst file, and put on the local machine?

  • If that's not likely, or not possible, what's another likely scenario?

I'm new to using MS Exchange, and I inherited this server right before we moved to Office 365.

For the most part, exporting pst files, and importing them has gone really well. However, we have one user who is having some issues. When I imported his pst file, he noticed that he only had emails going back to a certain, fairly recent date. He just changed computers, and we don't have his old computer anymore.

I'm assuming what happened (with very little knowledge of how exchange actually works), that before the date where he doesn't have any emails, he archived the emails, and that removed them from the pst and put them locally on his machine somewhere? This is absolutely a guess, and I imagine it is wrong.

Is that something that is possible, or is there something else that could have happened in this scenario?

trueCamelType
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    A PST file is a local file. Any PST files that were created would be on the local machine where they were created. Any email that was archived to a PST file would also be on the local machine from which the archive was performed. If you don't have access to the local machine where the PST files were created then you're at a bit of a loss. Exchange doesn't do anything with PST files and can't remove emails from PST files. – joeqwerty Mar 06 '17 at 18:23
  • Thanks for the knowledge. I'm guessing then, that when I export a pst file from the exchange server, that it only pulls from data stored in a database about the mailboxes? And I'm guessing the Archived data isn't in the same place, so it wouldn't export those with the .pst file? – trueCamelType Mar 06 '17 at 19:53
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    Exchange has its own concept of archiving to a secondary mailbox. PSTs are a file format used by MS Outlook. Recent versions of outlook don't archive mail automatically to a pst. If you are using an exchange style mail account connector (and not pop3/imap) outlook will store all the email it syncronizes with exchange in a file with a '.ost' extension. So, if mail is missing, someone has to have manually set up archiving to PST. If you can still read the old machines hard drive, you can just copy over the old psts files and open them in outlook. – Ian Murphy Mar 07 '17 at 13:21

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