Merging Categories from Outlook PST to Migrated emails on Office 365

Question

Is there a tool that will merge Outlook PST archived email Categories into a migrated Outlook 365 email account that has lost the categories?

Answer 1

If the Categories are still assigned to your messages, then you can right click on your Mailbox-> Data File Properties-> Upgrade to Color Categories...

A similar scenario is discussed here; Missing categories when transferring to Outlook on a new computer

Answer 2

Hi @Paul B ,

If the messages were sent to your account, it's suggested to import the .pst file and upgrade color categories as RobertSparnaaij mentioned to check.

Besides, if the messages were sent to other accounts and you need to add the categories to your master category list, we may need to re-update them manually via right-click the message with your custom category>choose category>all category>choose your category>new>type the name and color> ok

In order to make it easier, we could try to switch to the category views(View>Category)

Update :

As I know, there may be no option that could directly merge the category from file to account, and the easier way is importing the file directly as you know. As for the problem of duplicate items, if they are same email items in your account and the .pst file, we could actually choose the "replace duplicates with items imported" option when we import the file to avoid it, based on my tests, it could replace the item with the same item that has categories normally.

Also, if you wouldn't like to import that items that don't have category, we could open the original data file, group the message by category, export the items that you need to import to a new .pst file, then import this new file.

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Answer 3

The issue is not that the Category List is missing, but the category assignments are missing from the migrated Outlook 365 account email items themselves.

I have corrected the new email account to contain the correct Category list, and made assignments to emails as I did before for the time since (now) the migration occurred.

The Outlook PST archived email Categories were captured prior to my company migrating to O-365, where the categories column was not migrated.

I don't wish to import the PST into my active account, as this will duplicate a significant number of emails on my active account. I would prefer to simply merge the archived PST email item categories into the same email items on my active migrated Outlook 365 email account that is missing the category assignments.