How long will today's .pst files be readable

[Wekiva]

My office is in the middle of the shift to a "paperless" office. We are
trying to find out the best ways to archive all the different materials that
we use on a day to day basis. For instance we are consdering scanning all
important documents that are hard copies and creating .pdfs from them. When
it comes to archiving outlook email some have have raised concerns about how
long in the future we would be able to open today's .pst files. Has
Microsoft ever put up any type of guarantee about this? I'd love to find a
statement that says they will contine to support today's .pst files for XX
number of years.

 

[Jaime Ponce de Leon]

You could use OutlookExtract, www.outlookextract.com to extract your email
messages from the .pst files to disk or CD as single files. You can save the
messages as msg, eml, txt or htm. You can also save them as .pdf files in
single files or combining several messages in one PDF file.
The messages are stored with a unique name [From-Id-Subject.*].

 

[Gordon]

You could use OutlookExtract, www.outlookextract.com to extract your email
messages from the .pst files to disk or CD as single files. You can save the
messages as msg, eml, txt or htm. You can also save them as .pdf files in
single files or combining several messages in one PDF file.
The messages are stored with a unique name [From-Id-Subject.*].

You could also use some free applications - such as importing to Netscape or
Mozilla, which use the Unix Mbox mail folder format. This is readable in any
text editor.