Recently had to open Microsoft Exchange 2010 mail database .edb file recovered from a recent backup. I didn’t actually need to recover any emails or mailboxes, simply view what emails were present in one particular folder at the time of backup.

There are free tools which allow to do exactly this. I have tried two of them.

• Kernel Exchange EDB Viewer
  
  I Could open my .edb file and it displayed all mailboxes, but for some reason didn’t allow to expand items with the mailboxes.

• SysTools Exchange EDB Viewer
  
  This one worked as expected. Opened .edb database and allowed to to drill down into individual folders. Emails in folders can be sorted by From, Subject and Date fields. Only slight issue was that Date sort ordering was’t particularly intelligent. If date is displayed in UK format (DD/MM/YYY) it sorts items by day, then month, and then year. As a workaround I temporarily changed system date format to YYYY/MM/DD and then sorting worked as expected.

Both companies also offer similar tools that can recover/save emails and other items from .edb files, obviously these are commercial products. But for simple read only viewing above software works just fine.