What's the best way to get a stored POP3 password out of Outlook 2007?
- by Tom Morris
If you have a password for a POP3 account in Outlook 2007 (Windows 7 Home Premium) and you then forget the password, how do you retrieve it?
I tried copy-and-paste. No go.
I downloaded Mail PassView, but upon installing it, AVG said it was malware, so I removed it.
I eventually found the account details by opening up RegEdit, and found it in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook\ (...) but it was encoded in REG_BINARY. I Googled around and found various Visual Basic routines for decoding it but being a Unix dork I had absolutely no idea what to do with said scripts.
By this point, I gave up and managed to get hold of the password by another means (it was written down on a piece of paper in the briefcase of the owner of the account - I know, it makes the inner sysadmin rage). I also attempted to write a simple POP3 server in Python and then get Outlook to log on to it, but that didn't really work out (it was about 4am at that point).
For future reference, is there an easy and sensible way of doing this? Is Mail PassView actually evil spyware or was AVG just giving me a false positive? (Any chance of Windows 8 having something like OS X's Keychain?)
