Outlook will not open attachments with specific file names

Sometimes, when you’re trying to open an attachement from Outlook, it will refuse to do so, telling you something about insufficient disk space or lack of permissions. This will almost always happen with an attachment filename that you’ve opened many times before. For example, when you receive a weekly report called “Weekly Report.xls”.

Everytime you open a file, Outlook creates a local copy of the file in a temp folder. Next time you will open a file with the same name, it will add a (02) in the file name and so on, until it reaches (99). After that, it will not let you open the file. The solution to this annoying problem is actually pretty simple. All you need to do, is empty the temp folder and restart Outlook.

In order to do so, open up Registry Editor* and locate the following key: OutlookSecureTempFolder. 
You can either CTRL+F to find it, or navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security. Please note that 11.o refers to Office 2003. I don’t know whether this problem continues to appear in newer Office versions, but if you come accross it, instead of 11.0, you are looking for a 14.0.

Double click on the key, and copy the folder location. Now paste this in an explorer window and open the folder. Select all the files in there, delete them and restart Outlook. You’re done. Simple enough yes? This is a well known problem and it has been documented many times already.

While easy to solve, this problem can become really annoying when it appears often. So we are going to make our lives a bit simpler and automate this proccess.

First, we need to change the folder’s location to somethig simpler. I created a folder named “OutlookTemp” and changed the registry key to the new location.

In order for our changes to take effect, we need to restart our computer. Do that and then open Outlook. Find a couple of emails with attachements and open them. Now, if you navigate to the folder you selected as your new Outlook temp folder, you will see that there are already some files in there.

In the image above you notice that I opened the same attachment twice and it created second file.

If you are using a program to maintain your computer, such as CCleaner or System Mechanic, there might be an option to include this folder, so it will be cleaned up automatically. Since I don’t use such programs, I found a simple script that performs just this task:

set folder=”C:\OutlookTemp”

cd /d %folder%

for /F “delims=” %%i in (‘dir /b’) do (rmdir “%%i” /s/q || del “%%i” /s/q)

All you need to do is put the three lines above in a text file, save it as OutlookTempClean.bat (or any other name you like) and you are ready to go.

If you so wish, you can schedule this batch file to run once a month, or whenever you feel like) and you will not have to worry yourself again.

*I hope you understand that messing around with Registry Editor can cause problems with your computer and you need to be really careful. Yes, treat this sentence as a disclaimer.

How To Save Multiple PDF Attachments And Batch Print Them

Imagine the following scenario: You have a couple of thousand emails, each containing a pdf file and you have to print all of them. Nightmare, I know. Most people would select each email, open the attachment and print it, right?

Today I will show you how to save multiple Outlook attachments and how to batch print them, provided they are pdfs. There are other solutions too, for other type of files and perhaps someone might have a better approach. If so, I would like to hear about it in the comments.

You will need the following programs:

• OutllokAttachView. This is an excellent freeware program that scans your PST file for attachments and allows you to save them in a specified folder, or delete them. Works with Outlook 2003/2007/2010
• Adobe Acrobat. Mind you, I am not talking about Reader! This is the Adobe solution for creating pdfs, it is rather expensive and I am sure there might be alternatives to that. However, I happened to have it available, so I used it. Again, I am interested in other approaches in the comments.

After you download OutlookAttachView, extract the contents of the zip file into a folder and run the exe. It does not need installation, it just runs as is. You will be prompted to restrict the search parameters. As you can see in the following picture, I wanted to search only for pdfs:

A few seconds later, you will be shown a list of the attachments that were found.

Select all the pdfs you want to save and press the second icon from the toolbar (or F4).

Select the folder where you want them to be saved and press OK. Note that there are quite a few naming options in case you want to include time of creation, date etc, but for most of you, selecting the folder and pressing OK should be sufficient. All of your attachments should now be in the folder you chose. Time to open Acrobat.

Go to “Advanced –> Document Processing –> Batch Processing…”

Select “Print All” and click on “Run Sequence”. You will be prompted to select the files to be processed, so point Acrobat to the folder where you saved your pdfs, select all of them (ctrl+A) and press OK. The files will start printing on your default printer. Please note that you will not be able to change any print parameters, so you might want to check them before.

That’s it!

PS: You might want to try something else before resolving to a program such as Acrobat. Go to the folder where you saved your pfd files, select those you want to print (or all of them), right click and select “Print”. In my case some files would not print properly, so I decided to go with the Acrobat solution.