Opening attachment open temp folder on my hard drive

[Guest]

I experienced a strange thing lately. I received an e-mail with an
attachment. When I went to forward the e-mail, I double-clicked the
attachment to look at it. But what opened was my temp folder on my hard
drive. Can anyone explain this?
I am running Outlook 2002 SP3. The original e-mail was sent to me from an
external user.

Thanks.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I experienced a strange thing lately. I received an e-mail with an
attachment. When I went to forward the e-mail, I double-clicked the
attachment to look at it. But what opened was my temp folder on my
hard drive. Can anyone explain this?

In order to open an attachment, it must be placed on your hard drive first.
Applications that open files must open them from the hard drive. So, Outlook
extracts the attachment from the body of the message and places a copy in
the "Outlook Secure Temp Folder", then passes that file to the application
associated with its file type.

Does that explain it well enough?

 

[Guest]

I understand what you are saying. But I have never seen this before. How
can someone from outside our company send an e-mail in that has an attachment
that is a link to my temp directory? Is this something that I should be
concerned about?

Thanks.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I understand what you are saying. But I have never seen this before.
How can someone from outside our company send an e-mail in that has
an attachment that is a link to my temp directory?

They can't of course. Outlook will put ANY attachment you open in the temp
folder. Where else do you think it would open? It has to be on your hard
drive to open, so what would you like Outlook to do?

 

[Guest]

I understand that attachments open from the hard drive.

The problem that I am having is how can someone send an e-mail that has an
attachment that is a link to my entire temp directory?? Usually attachments
are just files. Does this indicate that the attachment is some type of
script that is opening a window in Explorer with the target location set as
the temp directory?
Thanks.

 

[Brian Tillman]

The problem that I am having is how can someone send an e-mail that
has an attachment that is a link to my entire temp directory??

They can't. What you saw was a side-effect of something on your PC alone.
Exactly what, I can't say because I wasn't watching what you did, but it's
certainly not because someone sent a link to your own temp folder.