Cannot save attachment error in Outlook XP/2003/2007
June 30, 2010The other day I came across an error with Outlook complaining that it couldn’t open an attachment.
It appears that when opening or saving an Outlook attachment it will save the file to it’s secure temporary location first. The issue with this is that if you have many attachments with the same filename, you may run into an issue whereby Outlook runs out of alternative filenames.
When Outlook saves the attachment to the temp location it uses the attachment name. However if the filename already exists it appends (#) where # is an incremental number starting at 1. It appears that when outlook reaches “filename (99)” it isn’t programmed to allow three digit numbers and hence fails to save the file.
The solution to this is to clear the temporary folder. You can work out where this folder is by looking at the registry location: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\###\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder” where ### is the Microsoft Office version. 11.0 for Outlook 2003.
