Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (ANSI) 1997-2002
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The Personal Folders File or PST is an open proprietary data file format used to store local copies of messages, calendar events, and other items within Microsoft software including Microsoft Office Outlook. PST files are used to store archived items and to maintain offline availability of the items. PST is a stand-alone, self-contained, structured binary file format that does not require any external dependencies. Each PST file represents a message store that contains an arbitrary hierarchy of Folder objects, which contains Message objects, which can contain Attachment objects. Information about Folder objects, Message objects, and Attachment objects are stored in properties, which collectively contain all of the information about the particular item. Now considered a legacy format and replaced by PST_Unicode, PST_ANSI was used by Microsoft Outlook 97-2002. It employs the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) character set and has an overall size limit of 2 gigabytes (GB). PST_ANSI uses 32-bit values to represent block IDs (BIDs) and byte index (IB).
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| Extensions | .pst |
|---|---|
| MIME types | application/vnd.ms-outlook |
| Signatures | 2142444e at byte 0 (Personal Storage Table *.pst (ANSI)) |
| PRONOM | x-fmt/248 |
| Wikidata | Q29651210 |
| Library of Congress | fdd000377 |
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From PRONOM, Wikidata. Updated 2026-10-20.