Have you ever opened a Microsoft Word document file with a simpler program such as Wordpad? If you have, you would have noticed a file full of ASCII character gibberish. When I make this mistake I simply close the file and reopen it with Word so as to be able to read it. Many file types can only be opened and read successfully with the program they were designed for. An example of this would be Microsoft DBX files. DBX files are the file type used with the free Microsoft e-mail client Outlook Express. When we accidentally delete Outlook Express messages or our messages become corrupted we must use a program designed to recover Outlook DBX file information.
By comparison the larger Microsoft e-mail client Outlook stores all of its file information into one super file known as a PST. PST stands for personal storage. A program to recover Outlook PST information must be able to recreate the access tables to that file.