Searching for an OST password remover after being locked out of an old OST and the results confuse me, half the tools are for PST and people argue OSTs have no passwords at all.
What is actually true here, and what does someone locked out of an OST actually need?
The arguers are right and the confusion is worth untangling because it changes what you should download.
PST files carry an optional file level password, the weak CRC32 kind. OST files carry no such thing: there is no menu to set one and no field in the format for it. What guards an OST is its binding to the MAPI profile that created it. The OST is a cache belonging to a profile and outside that profile Outlook refuses it entirely. The password prompt people remember was the account or Windows credential, never a file password.
So a locked out of an OST situation is really an orphaned OST situation: the profile or account is gone and the binding cannot be satisfied. What you need is not a password remover but an OST reader or converter that parses the file directly without MAPI, SysTools OST Converter does exactly this, opening the file standalone and exporting the contents to a fresh PST that any Outlook attaches normally.
Products marketed as OST password removers are mostly converters wearing search friendly branding, harmless if that is what they deliver, but knowing the mechanism lets you evaluate them: anything claiming to crack an OST password is describing a thing that does not exist.
That explains every confusing search result at once. Ran the converter on my orphaned file, contents out to PST, no password ever involved because there never was one.