There may be many issues due to which you might feel that your Outlook SRS File is corrupted and needs to be repaired. You might have searched for a solution while facing issues while sending or receiving your emails or when Microsoft Outlook rules are not working. One of the possible reasons for various Outlook related issues is a corrupt srs file. As a result you may be here to find out on how to locate and fix a srs file.
Before we proceed, let us go through some basic details about the srs file. What is the significance of this file, what are its contents, how corruption of an srs file can impact Outlook functionality, or why the file might be corrupted and how it can be fixed.
What is an SRS File?
Send and Receive Settings, popularly known as SRS file, is an extension of a file saved on your computer for your Outlook application. This file contains details related to sending and receiving emails for an Outlook profile.
The file name is actually dependent on the name of your Outlook profile. Based on the name of your Outlook profile, the name of the file may be different. Possibly, due to this reason it is known by its extension and not by its name.
SRS file is created at the time of creation of an Outlook profile but it gets updated when changes are made to send and receive settings. Also, as you can create multiple profiles in Microsoft Outlook, there can be multiple srs files. You need to look for the one with the name same as the Outlook profile with which you are facing an issue.
As you may know by now, it is a configuration or a settings file. If there haven’t been any changes made to send and receive settings in Outlook, then this file will contain just the basic details and no personalised configurations. But, if the user has made many custom updates from the Send and Receive option on the Outlook toolbar, then this file contains those changes as well.
Since this is an application related configuration file, there are a few restrictions associated with it such as:
- It can not be exported from one machine to another.
- SRS file should not be exported to a different version of Outlook.
- It should not be edited manually as it may lead to issues in accessing emails for the related Outlook account. Editing the SRS file may cause corruption as it is not in encoded and is not in human readable format.
- If the SRS file is deleted, you must restart your Outlook so that a new file is created during restart. If the Outlook is not restarted, there may be some issues related to sending or receiving emails.
Location of SRS File
It is sometimes difficult to locate where the srs file is saved on your system. The main reason is that in different Operating Systems it might be residing in a different location. Even different versions of Windows OS have different locations configured to save srs files.
The SRS file is located under the roaming Outlook folder for each of the Windows user accounts. Below are the locations for srs file specific to related Windows versions:
- For Windows XP and Windows 2000:
- For Windows Vista and Windows 7 onwards:
- For Windows XP and Windows 2000:
- For Windows Vista and Windows 7 onwards:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook
In the above paths, the username should be replaced by the name of your Windows account. It is not to be mistaken with the Outlook profile name we explained earlier.
Further, AppData or Application Data folder might be hidden by default. You will have to check “Show hidden files and folders” option under View Settings on the toolbar in the Windows explorer.
Alternatively, you can open the location of the srs file on your system by copying and pasting the below paths for corresponding Windows version:
%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
%appdata%\microsoft\outlook
Impact of a Corrupt SRS File
As the file contains details related to send and receive settings of the Outlook profile, any damage to this file can cause a wide variety of issues.
Some common issues faced due to a corrupt SRS file include:
- Send/Receive email button not updating latest emails.
- Outlook rules are not working as expected.
- Receiving Outlook error – ‘not implemented’ while sending an email.
How to Fix a Corrupt SRS File
After discussion all about SRS files, let’s now move on fixing a corrupt SRS file.
- Rename the SRS file
As discussed earlier, a corrupted SRS file can lead to multiple issues. This file is created by default when the Outlook application starts or when a new profile is created. The easiest way to fix it is to rename the file or move it to a different location so that Outlook doesn’t read from the corrupt file and creates a new one on restart.
- First, you need to locate the srs file with the help of the steps provided above.
- Then, rename the srs file such as Profile1.srs can be renamed to Profile1_old.srs or Profile1.srs.old.
- After this, restart your Outlook application.
Once the system is started again, verify if your issue has been fixed.
Follow the above-mentioned steps carefully, and this is how a srs file can be fixed. If issues are persisting even after trying both of the methods, you can try recreating your Outlook profile. Doing this will recreate an SRS file on your system and you will end-up having a healthy srs file.
To make your Outlook even healthier, you can try some manual techniques to repair PST file, or try using Outlook PST Recovery as this tool can fix damaged, broken or corrupt PST in minutes. PST is very important for any Outlook user and hence this PST file recovery tool can be life-saving at times.
Conclusion:
In this blog, we have discussed all about an srs file. Basically this blog was dedicated to fix a corrupt srs file. There are a few approaches to fix an srs file and we tried to list them in this blog. At last we mentioned a PST repair tool to fix a corrupt PST file and recover important data. Hope this blog helped you.
