# PC broken - How to retrieve Outlook mails



## Shakemachine (Apr 23, 2010)

The harddrive on my parents computer is broken, and we can't retrieve any information from it. We are buying a new computer, but they are anxious to get their mails back. They used outlook on the old computer.
Now that we are buying them a new computer, is there any way we can retrieve the old mails they had in outlook when the PC broke?
They email addresses they had belonged to their old ISP. They recently changed ISP, but kept the old email adresses.
Are the emails stored on the ISPs server somewhere? How would we go about retrieving it? And would we contact old or new serviceprovider?
Hope someone can help


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## RSpecianjr (Jan 20, 2010)

Hey Shakemachine,

Emails can be tricky sometimes, because it depends on how you had outlook set up. As long as the old ISP's server has copies of the emails, you can configure your new outlook to the email address you want to recover and old ISP's pop settings. 

ISP's usually offer an online email client, webmail. I would first check that to see if the emails are there (usually less steps than configuring outlook).

_*Note: The incoming pop server is going to be your old ISP's incoming pop server and the outgoing server will probably be your new ISP's outgoing server.*_

If you are unsure what the pop settings are, you can usually find it in a google search. If that doesn't turn anything up, the ISP's should provide it for you no problem.

What happened with the old harddrive? 

Also, what are you doing with the old computer? = D

Hope this helps,

Robert Specian Jr.


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## cwoggon (Apr 20, 2010)

Shakemachine said:


> The harddrive on my parents computer is broken, and we can't retrieve any information from it. We are buying a new computer, but they are anxious to get their mails back. They used outlook on the old computer.
> Now that we are buying them a new computer, is there any way we can retrieve the old mails they had in outlook when the PC broke?
> They email addresses they had belonged to their old ISP. They recently changed ISP, but kept the old email adresses.
> Are the emails stored on the ISPs server somewhere? How would we go about retrieving it? And would we contact old or new serviceprovider?
> Hope someone can help


Have you attempted hooking the drive up as an external device (Or slave to another drive)? If you are able to get at the files that way you will be able to recover the emails with relative ease. 

Otherwise, RSpecianjr's idea of recovering it from the ISP's webmail is probably your best bet, but there is no guarantee the ISP left their email account active when they switched.


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## TheGift73 (Oct 17, 2006)

As cwoggon said, if you can hook up the drive to your computer (remember to change the jumpers on your parents drive to make it the Slave) then take ownership of it (if required) and navigate to the Outlook folder to copy the .pst files C:\Documents and Settings\User profile\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Oulook which can be found by following this path:- C:\Documents and Settings\User profile\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

I am guessing that your parents are using XP.

Once you have a copy of the .pst files (outlook.pst) then you can simply import them onto the new PC.


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