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Outlook is an email providing service launched by MS as a part of the Microsoft Office. The office suite is built by Microsoft to store and transfer information such as schedules, calendars, contact information, professional emails, important events, birthdays, dates, and many other daily tasks and work at one place. Outlook was launched in 1997 by Microsoft as a significant segment of the 1997 suite. The aim of Microsoft to introduce this package was to provide its users with the scope of sharing personal and professional information from one place to another safely and efficiently. But a corrupted Outlook account can lead to dire consequences for its user.

Since the launch of Outlook, it is continuously being upgraded and advanced by Microsoft which is bringing numerous changes in its user interface, features, convenience to use, and functionality.

What leads to Outlook Corruption?

Although Microsoft is one of the biggest tech giants globally, Outlook has a robust network when it comes to functions. But continuous working and load on Outlook on a gigantic scale causes a few bugs and errors in the service, leading to outlook corruption. Moreover, the new updates in the outlook application can also bring some bugs in the file leading to malfunctioning. Although Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world in terms of technology, the consistent bugs in Outlook have created a negative impression of the company in the minds of Outlook users.

From the plethora of reasons of public criticism faced by Microsoft for its Outlook application, the most common one was its Corrupted Outlook PST file. The PST file is the service provided by Outlook to its users through which they can transfer their data from one file to another. Moreover, they can recover their data from the PST file if the data is deleted, corrupted, or even permanently deleted from the account.

The data recovery feature of Outlook has made their application unique among other competitors as other email service providers either do not give a data transfer facility or give just a limited amount of storage, for example, Gmail, an email service provider by Google provides only 15 GB of storage, whereas, Outlook provides total storage of 50 GB, which is more than three times of google.  It is undeniable that PST is an indispensable part of Microsoft Outlook and the fundamental foundation of Outlook is based on PST files only.

A corrupted Outlook interface can be led to catastrophic consequences for a corporation as data is a crucial element for every organization.

Here are a few reasons why a PST file get corrupted:

Technical glitches, software failures and their causes

Software failure is a very common error and complication faced by many applications, leading to Corruption in PST files and the entire Outlook. Software corruption is broadly caused due to four factors. The primary factor is the size of the file. However, Microsoft is continuously putting efforts in increasing the file storage capacity of Outlook with new updates over the last few years, and it can be observed that as the files started reaching their maximum capacity, the possibilities of files getting a corrupted Outlook account increased drastically. Most of the cases of Corrupted Outlook files are due to maximum storage. The server’s speed is restricted to avoid the traffic on the server, which may cause a glitch in some of the files.

Secondarily, the outlook files may also get corrupted due to a malware attack in the file. If the data stored on your desktop contains any virus, malware, or there is potential threat to your PST files, it can damage your Outlook application drastically including all the information of calendars, schedules, reminders, notes, essential mails, and much more. In addition to that, if a person transfers his information or data from one desktop to another, there is a considerable possibility that the data you are transferring may consist of malware that can harm that particular desktop leading to dire consequences.

Followed by the malware and virus threats on your computer, another possible reason can be applying third-party software on your computer. Outlook supports numerous extensions and add-ons in its application. However, a security check is a mandatory policy of Microsoft when it comes to allowing an extension on its outlook application; few applications may contain a possible threat to the PST file leading to corruption in the Outlook.

External and hardware failures

Even though Outlook more commonly experiences internal failures and malfunctions for users, it is undeniable that external failures play a crucial role in corrupted Outlook.

The hard drive is a physical device situated in the computer in which all the computer’s data is stored. If the hard drive gets corrupted or damaged for some reason, the entire data present in the outlook file may get lost.

Moreover, the data connection in most places in the world is not robust enough. Slow data connection leads to disruption in the file transfer and continuous denials due to internet connectivity and data corruption.

Eventually, a famous saying is that a fully damaged external device is less harmful than a slightly damaged device. If a small segment of the device is fanged off the computer, it may lead to incompletely written data, data cavities, and data overwriting. It may even take ample time to notice a corrupted Outlook account to diagnose it until the damage is already done to the Outlook file.

How to avoid Outlook corruption?

It is a sense of relief for all the users that even if there is corruption in their Outlook files, there are a lot of trusted and reliable tools available in the market such as Datanewman, which helps to recover the data even from the permanently deleted files.

Furthermore, you can take several precautions in consideration to avoid a corrupted Outlook account, such as not filling the data to the files’ total capacity, upgrading to the newest version, and not installing any third-party software on your computer, which can be a potential threat to your Outlook.