Edited an attached file to a msg, saved the file. Edits are gone

P

Pomaikai

I opened an file attached to an email msg, made edits, and clicked on save on
the file itself. I closed the email message, and edits are gone. I thought
Outlook would save the file in a temporary folder, but I cannot find the file
anymore. where does it save the file?
 
B

Ben M.Schorr

What if you open the e-mail message and re-open the attachment in it. Do you
see your edits there?
 
V

VanguardLH

Pomaikai said:
I opened an file attached to an email msg, made edits, and clicked on save on
the file itself. I closed the email message, and edits are gone. I thought
Outlook would save the file in a temporary folder, but I cannot find the file
anymore. where does it save the file?

You opened HOW? By opening the attachment within the e-mail (which means
Outlook has to create a temp copy of it in its secure temp folder)? Or by
saving the attachment to a file on your hard disk and editing it there?

If you have Outlook open the attachment, it first has to decode the long
text string in the MIME part in the body of the message and save it
somewhere. That somewhere is a file on the hard disk. It is created in
Outlook's secure temp folder (<TIFfolder>\OLKxxx). Well, if you edit that
file, just how is the e-mail going to change? You aren't editing the
e-mail. You are editing the *file* that got created separately by Outlook
to allow you to edit THAT file. Unless you used Save As to store the edited
copy somewhere else, guess where the edited file resides? Yep, in Outlook's
secure temp folder.

Upon proper exit from Outlook, it will clean out its secure temp folder.
That means you lose the file that Outlook put there and which was the file
that you changed. The changed file will only still be in that folder if
Outlook did not close properly or you left that file open in whatever
application you were using to edit it (i.e., there was still an open handle
on that file so it could not be closed and deleted by Outlook).

To find the folder name for Outlook's secure temp folder, look in the
registry under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\<version>\Outlook\Security

where <version> is whatever version of Outlook that you installed; e.g.,
10.0 for Office XP, 11.0 for Office 2003, and so on. The data item named
"OutlookSecureTempFolder" points to Outlook's temporary file path.

Also read:
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/securetemp.htm
 

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