How do I upgrade my Outlook PST to 2003 format?

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Thank you very much for this tip. Everything worked well except the fact that I get an error message when I try to bring contacts at the New Message dialogue. I click OK, the the contacts list shows empty. I have to pulldown the address book list on the top right corner and choose the second occurrence of "Contacts".

Whenever I have trouble with PST files that weight more than 2GB I use this http://www.cimaware.com/main/products/outlookfix.php to fix it. It allows me to reduce the file size by splitting it up it several smaller files.

There is one more easy solution to upgrade Outlook to Outlook 2003 (Unicode). Download easy & quick SysTools PST Upgrade Tool to upgrade PST files of Outlook to Outlook 2003/2007.

Download the software from: http://www.pstupgrade.com

Too bad PST upgrade isn't free for home users !
Otherwise it might be useful ...

Thanks for the tip! I would like to add one other tip - I use a handheld (HP IPAQ) - after doing what you suggested activesync no longer worked and told me that the outlook profile changed - the specific code was
"activesync support code 0x8503001F"
I needed to then go in and delete the partnership and recreate it.

Just a note I am working with outlook 2003 on Windows Vista.

thanks again..

After an 18 hour power failure (while many programs were open)we have no email or contacts when we open Outlook 2000. We have an old pst file from last year. Is it possible to have lost the current pst file entirely?

Great article and good comments, too.

If you are like me, getting about 500 emails per day and running at least 12 mailbox rules to sort email, one extra step that is helpful due to the time-consuming nature of this "upgrade" process is to stop the incoming mail flow until everything is ready to go.

In Outlook 2003, go to "Options", "Mail Setup", then click the "Send/Receive" option button. Form there, you can "Edit" the "All accounts" group. In there, you can either uncheck the "Receive email" checkbox, or uncheck the "Include in this group" option".

Or, if you don't like mucking with settings, simply pull the Ethernet cable until you are done. (If you are just copying from an old PST format to a new format, it won't matter if you are on an Exchange server.)

-- Rob "I" --

Thanks for these posts. One obvious question that wasn't answered by this and related articles on this site, is whether the 2 GB pst repair problems affect 97 format PST, 2003 format PST, or both. I have Outlook 2003 with the old 97 format PST, and Outlook simply stops putting any more in the PST once it reaches 2 GB (eg. stops receiving email etc), thus preventing the file from growing larger than that. Which suggests problems with PST files > 2 GB might only be with 2003 format PSTs? But given all the comments, that's not at all clear, despite the fact that none of the 2 GB repair tool solutions mentioned say anything about 97 vs 2003 formats. In other words, I want to know whether by upgrading to the 2003 format, and of course quickly exceeding 2 GB, I'll now make my PST susceptible to not being repairable. If that's the case, the whole article's purpose is questionable, so I want to know :-) Can this be clarified?

Very helpful instructions, thank you! One thing that did not work for me as described is the calendar folder. I could not find a List view in Outlook 2003. Instead, I used the Active Appointments view. You can also customize the view to inlcude appointments for any time range.

And one more thing: don't forget the Tasks folder if you have any (it's one of the "speacial" folders so you would have to copy the tasks from the existing folder to the new one).

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