How to repair a corrupted Outlook inbox

Yeah, it happened to me: my Outlook 2003 inbox became corrupted once I needed to install a program to my PC and reboot afterwards.

Okay, I'm not sure if exactly that caused my inbox to become corrupted, but nonetheless I couldn't see those four or five important mails that were there.

Yes, I do have a weekly backup routine, but unfortunately that didn't help now, as I had received new mail just few days ago, and so the backup wouldn't help me there (note to self: figure out a better backup solution).

What did I do to solve the issue, then? After fiddling around with the PST files, I tried to do a search (find) to my inbox. And indeed, that shoved my e-mails! Whoa, data saved. I immediately copied the mails to a safe place.

But still, my Inbox was corrupted (symptomps being: mails showing, but without a subject, body or sender details, and no chance of deleting/moving/opening/seeing them) and I needed to solve this.

I created a new .PST file, and moved all the accessible mails to the new file. Then suddenly, Outlook was kind enough to tell me my old PST file has become corrupted.

I must give credit to the error message: it mentioned a tool named "scanpst.exe" that might be able to help. Great!

I found this tool in the directory "C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033" (could it be more easily accessible, please?) and ran it. And yes, it fixed my old PST file!

Next time when this happens, I gotta run this little utility first. Seems like a precious one to me.