


There might be some kind of limitations with the 3rd party Exchange provider mentioned that have led to using PST files in the first place, e.g. staged migration (Exchange 2003/2007) for migrating users part at a time.cutover migration to move all mailboxes (less than 2000) at once.

Office 365 has several tools to migrate mailbox contents directly from on-premises Exchange: However, intermediate PST files aren't necessary in most cases. The difference between OST and PST is well discussed here, and Massimo is closest to best practices with Mailbox Export Requests. The original question states that data is collected to PST files with Outlook on individual computers, which leads to believe that users should migrate their own data with import tool on Outlook. pst in order to migrate them to Office 365 via PST importing by network upload. (*) In Outlook 2013, OST files are used for IMAP4 too, which makes sense, since IMAP4 keeps the messages on the server and accesses them remotely, instead of downloading them like POP3.Īll the other answers sticks to the idea, that Exchange Server mailboxes needs to be exported into. There is, however, a better option for exporting Exchange mailboxes to PST files: you can do that on the Exchange server itself, using a Mailbox Export Request you can also do that in bulk, exporting several (or all) of your mailboxes. You could force Outlook to download all messages to a PST file by configuring it to connect to Exchange using POP3/SMTP instead of MAPI or Outlook anywhere, but this would make most Exchange features (like GAL, calendar sharing, shared mailboxes, public folders, and so on) unusable it's a highly not-recommended configuration. This local cache can also be disabled for Exchange mailboxes, as others have mentioned. Outlook uses OST files as a local cache of Exchange mailboxes when connected to an Exchange server using MAPI or Outlook Anywhere it instead uses PST files when connected to POP3/IMAP4 accounts (*).
