OST scam

[MrMobodies]

I was looking for a tool to look into Outlook cache files to see what spam mail might have caused problems.

I found one on Codeplex but not before finding a lot of lookalike copies of this tool that dominates Google search and it seems that there is a campaign to aggressively try and sell these things under different brand names. On boards they say it is free before the link or "there is no free tool etc. and to me the look dodgy and it is everywhere.


The one that I found and works:
https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=xstreader

Very basic but does the job.

By just searching these are some out of the many that come up in front:
https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=freeosttopstdownload
https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=osttopstconvertersoftware
https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=ostpst
https://www.visordown.com/forum/general/ost-file-recovery-tool-recover-ost-file
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/microsoft.public.outlook.general/ZsawSQ0LzWc

And they're not free.

Just look on Google images and it is flooded with these lookalike things.

Then there are people asking where can I get a viewer and the replies on most of them robot replies that links to one of those.

I have reported a few to Microsoft who said that Codeplex was suppose to be free for developers and I was told they were going to be taken down.


Do you think there is any justification for that nonsense?

[rrinker]

 I don't know about the others, but the Kernel product is legit. We regularly use their other tool which can read Exchange Server EDB files to save customers from themselves. It's a super handy tool for recovering unmountable databases, or for recovering data from old backups when there no longer is an Exchange server to mount it on.

[MrMobodies]

I don't know about the others, but the Kernel product is legit. We regularly use their other tool which can read Exchange Server EDB files to save customers from themselves. It's a super handy tool for recovering unmountable databases, or for recovering data from old backups when there no longer is an Exchange server to mount it on.

Well that's good.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070205013239/http://www.kerneldatarecovery.com/

I see they have been around since 2007 and they offer a free OST viewer tool.



I see it doesn't look as dodgy as the others and that might be something I might be willing to buy when I need it.
 
The one in the picture is also labelled Kernel but had "Lepede" by it which is also seems legitimate. It looks like they might have had an agreement to alter and distribute Kernel OS2 it but it is not easy to know what to trust when the search engine is flooded full of those things on the above links.