Beware of PST Imports

It never ceases to amaze us how many recommendations are put out by people (including consultants) to do a PST import into a new mailbox in order to migrate data. Not only that, but these recommendations are either put out because of the lack of knowledge by the person recommending this method or without disclosing the problems associated with it. Here’s what they don’t tell you …

If you do a PST import of data regardless of what protocol you used to download it in the first place, you basically end up with messages that are unrepliable. Yes, that’s right, all of your messages are unrepliable regardless of whether the messages were downloaded via POP, IMAP, Exchange or any other protocol with Outlook. The reason is that Outlook stores the addresses as entry IDs which is what you are replying to.

When you import the message, it will look like it resolves properly to the recipient (looks like everything is good even when you view properties of the recipient). But once you hit that reply button and press send, your message will bounce back and ultimately will never get delivered. The only way around this is to remove all recipients from the address fields and re-enter all of them back manually.

Think twice next time someone tells you to do a PST import.