Comments on: Recovering a file from the Outlook temp folder

By: Campamocha

Campamocha — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 23:21:02 +0000

Thanks Jason! Saved me hours of work!

I wanted to add a couple of instructions for not so experienced users.
1.- Go to Start, then RUN and type Regedit
2.- On the left side tree, look for the path correspondent to your version of outlook. for example for Outlook 2007 you will clic on all the folders to take you to the desired path:
My computer then
HKEY_CURRENT_USER then
Software then
Microsoft then
Office then
12.0 then
Outlook then
Security

On the right window you should see a file called OutlookSecureTempFolder and in the Data column you should see the location in your computer of this file.

Now go to explorer and and type the address that you saw in the data column of the registry (most of the times you won’t see the folders even though you uncheck the hide option in the folder so you will have to type it yourself).

In my case it was
C:Documents and Settingsyour_NameLocal SettingsTemporary Internet FilesContent.OutlookX815QHPQ

Browse in the particular folder where the registry address pointed to and your file should be there.

Seconding Jason, email Microsoft and ask them why they hate you so much

By: Metadata

Metadata — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:14:54 +0000

Jason, Thanks for taking the trouble to document this. It probably saved me many hours of searching for those temp files. I did exactly what you outlined — modified an outlook attachment and then forgot to save it before closing it. Luckily, thanks to google and you, I was able to recover it. This works for Win7 and Outlook 2007.

By: Aligntech

Aligntech — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:07:12 +0000

Hi there Jason,

just stumbled onto your post after assisting a client with this issue. Hadn’t hit this yet on a win 7 box but had done so millions of times under xp where it was simpler because when you hit ‘save as’ from opening the attachment in Outlook at least it took you to this temp folder and voila all the attachments are there. Doesn’t do this in Win7. The only thing I wanted to add was to save you going into DOS to do this copy. You can actually navigate to this folder (I could in XP anyway) by typing the path into the address field.

Eg. I could get as far as C:Documents and Settings[I]user[/I]Local SettingsTemporary Internet Files but no folders appear. The trick then is to type “Content.Outlook” after this and push enter and bingo the ‘hidden’ folder will appear and then the randomly named secure folder.

I figure there may be differences in variables depending on OS but this worked in XP SP3.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Daniel