PST to DBX Conversion – Do it Yourself with Easy Manual Trick

pst to dbxSwitching from Outlook Express to Outlook seems to be quite common in these days. People switch their old email client to Outlook due to many reasons. But sometimes users need to switch from their Outlook email client to the old Outlook Express. As Outlook Express doesn’t support PST file, you can’t access your mailbox content stored in Outlook data files. In such situation, you need to convert PST to DBX format.

In terms of technology, it’s really very amazing to see that we’ve progressed a lot in just a very short period of time. These days, email or electronic mail has become the best communication medium for all individuals as well as organizations. The reason is fairly simple; it’s quick and easy way to stay in touch with family, friends and business clients. It plays a major role in communication, both personal and professional. It’s one of the most preferred forms of corporate communication. In the business world, it provides an easy and fast way to keep in touch with your co-workers, employees and business clients.

Advantages of Email for Communication

  • Instantaneous: Email is almost instantaneous. It doesn’t take enough time to be transferred from one person to another. You don’t have to wait for days or weeks to get a response or answer via email.
  • Easy to Send and Receive: Email can be easily sent and received by any email user. It’s also very simple to understand. You can type any short or brief message and send it to your friend or any recipient via email. On the other hand, your friend or the recipient will receive your messages within a few seconds.
  • Economical: Email is the most economical and cost-effective medium of communication. It doesn’t cost much. In fact, it’s absolutely free. You can freely and easily communicate with one another with no production, materials or postage cost.
  • Widely Accepted: Email is widely accepted by every community, i.e. individual, a group of individuals and business. A very large number of computer users use email service every day to send and receive messages.

These are some main advantages of email. You need an email program to use the email service, i.e. send and receive emails. There are many email programs which provide you multiple features, such as a huge storage capacity, effective spam filtering, a quick and user-friendly interface and many more. The two most common and preferred email programs are Outlook Express and MS Outlook. The similar names of these programs may lead to confusion over email users. But in reality, Outlook Express is different from MS Outlook. They share a common architectural philosophy, but don’t share a common database.

Outlook Express

Outlook Express is a popular email client application developed by Microsoft. It enables you to send and receive email messages and also helps you store and manage them. Outlook Express is one of the best email programs because it is free and comes bundled with Internet Explorer web browser v4.0 to v6.0. It doesn’t provide you an email account. You have to set-up or add your pre-existing email accounts in Outlook Express. There’s no prior limit for email accounts addition in Outlook Express, i.e. you can add multiple email accounts to your Outlook Express program.

In Outlook Express, there are four default folders: Inbox, Sent Items, Drafts, and Outbox. All your incoming emails are received in the Inbox folder. Additionally, you can also create some other folders under Inbox folder. Once the email account(s) has been added or configured in Outlook Express, you can easily send and receive email messages. Outlook Express uses DBX files to store all the email messages (both sent and received). The DBX files can be found in Outlook Express Store Folder.

Locate Outlook Express Store Folder

In Outlook Express, go to Tools > Options > Maintenance, then click on Store Folder to determine its location. 

Once you have determined the “Store Folder” location, go to it. When you open the Store Folder, you’ll see a set of DBX files. The files will be shown like this: Inbox.dbx, Sent Items.dbx, Drafts.dbx and Deleted Items.dbx. Every file contains messages from the appropriate message folder in Outlook Express. Other than these files, there’s one more file: Folders.dbx. It stores the master index for all the mailboxes and contains a structure of all newsgroups, email folders, and some synchronization data.

Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager, which is also designed by Microsoft. It’s a part of the popular Microsoft Office suite, although it can be purchased separately as a single application. It’s known as the most popular and best email management software in the world. Microsoft Outlook is more popular than Outlook Express and commonly used in these days. Like Outlook Express, it also enables you to send and receive email messages and also helps you store and manage them. Additionally, it also provides features like calendar, task management, contact management, note taking, journal creation and web browsing which are not available in Outlook Express.

Just like the Outlook Express, the Outlook client doesn’t provide you any personal email account. You have to add an email account manually in order to use MS Outlook as an email client application. You can add multiple email accounts to your MS Outlook profile. Once you have added an email account in MS Outlook, then after that you need to configure the advanced settings. MS Outlook uses PST or personal storage table to store your email messages, contacts, calendar events and other mailbox data.

How to Find PST files?

To find the PST file in your system, you should determine the location of the file. See the steps shown below to determine the location of your PST according to your MS Outlook version.

To find PST file, follow the steps shown below: 

Step 1: Launch your MS Outlook program.

MS Outlook 2010

Step 2: Now click the File tab on the main menu. Then click Info tab on the menu.

How to Find PST files

Click Account Settings tab and again click Account Settings…

Step 3: The Accounts Settings dialog box will appear.

How to Find PST files

Step 4: Click Data Files on the main menu.

How to Find PST files

You can see the file name and location there. Now click Close.

DBX and PST are the two most common email file formats. If you’re an Outlook Express user, you can’t open a PST file in it. And if you use MS Outlook, then you can’t open a DBX file in it. The reason is clearly simple, Outlook Express doesn’t support PST file format and MS Outlook doesn’t support DBX file format. The DBX files should only be opened in Outlook Express and shouldn’t be tried to import manually to any other email program. If the files are opened, edited and imported manually, they may become corrupted or damaged, and can cause the performance issues of Outlook Express. However, there’s a way to import your Outlook Express data to Microsoft Outlook. Though it’s a time-consuming task, it’s highly effective. Click here to know how to import DBX to Microsoft Outlook

The same problem occurs with MS Outlook’s PST files. Neither you can open them in Outlook Express, nor can you import them directly. Microsoft provides an Import feature in Outlook Express that can help you import your data from PST files to the Outlook Express.

How to Convert PST to DBX?

Step 1: First, launch Microsoft Outlook on your system. 

how to import pst file

Then Click File tab > Open and click Import.

Step 2: The Import and Export Wizard will appear on your Window.

export pst to outlook express

select the Export to a file option in the list, and then click Next.

Step 3: On Export to a File window, select Comma Separated Values (DOS) in the list.

export pst to outlook express

Click Next to continue the process.

Step 4: Select any folder (single folder at a time) from the list which you want to export. Click Next.

export pst to outlook express

Step 5: Click Browse to select a location for new CSV file.

export pst to outlook express

You can see the selected location in the edit box. Click Next.

Step 6: The following actions will be performed.

export pst to outlook express

Now click Finish.

Step 7: This will start the exporting process on your system. Please wait until it gets successfully completed.

export pst to outlook express

Step 8: Now open your Outlook Express program, click File > Import > Other Address Book.

Step 9: Select Text File. Then click Next.

Step 10: Find the file you exported earlier from Microsoft Outlook. And then click Next.

Step 11: Click the checkboxes to map the CSV files to the correct address book fields.

Step 12: Click the Import This Field option. Finally, click Finish.

This is the way by which you can use your PST files’ data in your Outlook Express program. But this way might not be so effective and it may require sound knowledge. Also, it may take more than enough time to import each and every single folder of the PST file if they are large in numbers. To avoid these limitations, you can try a professional solution that can help you convert PST to DBX format.

Professional Solution for Converting PST to DBX Format

You can use SysInfoTools Email Converter to convert your email files into other popular file formats. It supports conversion of Outlook Express’ DBX and EML file and MS Outlook’s PST and MSG files into these formats: DBX, EML, PST, MSG, RTF, and HTML. This is the only solution in the market that supports conversion of multiple types of email files into other formats. It works as a non-destructive application that doesn’t cause any changes or modification of the original files. The software supports all popular versions of Outlook Express and MS Outlook. To know more about this software, please visit SysInfoTools’ website and download the free demo version of this software.

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