top of page

LITIGATION SUPPORT TIP OF THE NIGHT

The views expressed in this blog are those of the owner and do not reflect the views or opinions of the owner’s employer. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. This policy is subject to change at any time. The owner is not an attorney, and nothing posted on this site should be construed as legal advice. Litigation Support Tip of the Night does not provide confirmation that any e-discovery technique or conduct is compliant with legal, regulatory, contractual or ethical requirements.

See my post on Running Regex Searches With a Grep Utility on the ILTA litigation support blog.

New tips for paralegals and litigation support profesionals are posted to this site each week. Click on the blog headings for better detail.

See How-To Videos on my YouTube channel.

Cracking Outlook .pst archive file passwords

Sean O'Shea
Nov 10, 2016
1 min read

The password encryption method used by Outlook for .pst archive files is not very sophisticated. Nirsoft has a free utility that can crack the password for these files if you come across them during collection and the custodian has either forgotten, or is not available to provide the password.

As you see the PstPassword utility actually generates three different passwords. One of these passwords will open the .pst archive, and none of them is the same as the password the user originally created for the archive. The documentation says that "This utility can recover the PST passwords of Outlook 97, Outlook 2000,Outlook XP, Outlook 2003, and Outlook 2007", but I tested it tonight and it can also detect .pst file passwords created with Outlook 2010. It will not generate passwords for Outlook 2016 .pst archives.