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Can’t Open Attachments in MS Outlook? Try this

cannot open outlook attachment

For strange reasons, I suddenly couldn’t open email attachements (PDFs, TIFF, etc.) from Outlook 2010. This article explains how you could solve that issue.

Whenever you open an attachments in an email directly from your Microsoft Outlook, it keeps a copy of the attachment in a Secure temporary folder on your computer. ThisĀ  is done for various reasons, one of the reasons is to let your anti-virus to scan the attachment before it’s opened. Over time, this folder accumulates too many files that prevents your Outlook from writing new files into this folder. This is usually why you are not able to open attachments from Outlook anymore.

To solve this, you have to clear the Outlook temporary files. There are few ways to do it, you can manually delete it or use an application to clear all temporary and unwanted history files from your computer.

To manually cleare the SecureTemp folder, close Outlook, then type shell:cache in the Start Menu of your Windows 7 computer as shown below, then manually delete all the files in the folders.

cannot open outlook attachment

cannot open outlook attachment

Another way to clear the temporary files is to use thrid party applications like CCleaner. Please read the instructions as you install this kind of applications as you may not want to install other freebies like Internet Explorer Toolbars, Screensavers, etc. come with it. CCleaner is one of the better and popular free system cleaning applications. You can read a review on CCleaner here.

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