Draft email sent to another person

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I have been asked about a situation where one user has created a draft email and emailed it as an attachment to another user.

The person that it has been sent to, opened up the attached email and made significant changes to it then clicked on File, Save. They then closed over the email (the draft attached to another email) and when they went back into it (the attachment within the email) none of the changes were saved…

Personally I would never advise people to work in this way, but it has raised the question – when it was saved, where was it saved to?? I have completed the very same steps on my own machine and am not able to find the saved email anywhere – not anywhere within the mailbox, not in any temp location. I even performed a search for all files that had been amended on the machine that day – nothing was found that related to the saved email. Can you think of any location or way of retrieving it??

Thanks

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Agreed: relying on Outlook to save changes to attachments is a high risk gamble.

In Outlook 2003, if I modify an attached draft message (let’s call it message2) to a received message (let’s call it message1), and save message2, then when I close message1 Outlook will prompt me to save the changes. This is a critical step to retain the changes to message2, and will alter the original received message1.

Outlook 2007 appears to work a bit differently. For example, I don’t think it has the Edit > Edit message choice in the ribbon for a message. Maybe the above is no longer possible? I can’t test at the moment.

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when it was saved, where was it saved to?

IF it was saved, it would be in the Temporary Internet Folder Location, a hidden folder somewhere like this, where ????? is a somewhat randomly named folder:

C:Documents and SettingsLocal SettingsTemporary Internet FilesContent.Outlook?????

You should be able to find the exact location in this Registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0OutlookSecurityOutlookSecureTempFolder

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Thanks to you both. I’ll test the saving of both messages in the morning to see how i get on – we use outlook 2003, so may have some success.

I specifically checked the temporary Internet folders, as I am aware this is where attached files will live, however there were no .MSG files. But then again, is this the format it would take? It was an HTML email, so should it save in this format??

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I specifically checked the temporary Internet folders, as I am aware this is where attached files will live, however there were no .MSG files. But then again, is this the format it would take? It was an HTML email, so should it save in this format??

In 2003 it should have defaulted to a .MSG file, so it looks any edits were lost when the user closed Outlook.

Note, for Outlook 2003 the TIF should be
C:Documents and SettingsLocal SettingsTemporary Internet FilesOLK??

and the Registry key showing this path at:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice11.0OutlookSecurityOutlookSecureTempFolder

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Morning,

I have now managed to test this out…

If message 1 is the email sent and message 2 is the email attached within message 1, then when I made a change to message 2 and saved it – on reopening from within message 1 the change was not saved. However after making the change on message 2, saving within message 2 and then saving the message 1 – the change made within message 2 was there.

During this testing I checked the contents of my Outlook Secure Temp folder (OLKCA) and at no time did any of the messages make it into this location. So though it is being saved, it does not seem that it is going through the temp folder. I searched thecontents of my computer immediately after for all files that were modified this morning and the only relevant thing that came up from about the time of testing was the .ost file. So is this where it saves??

I am resigned to the fact that the email that was changed yesterday will never return and that the user will have to add their changes again – and in doing so will learn a valuable lesson not to trust Outlook to save attachments within emails…but I’m curios as to how it all works now..

Alba

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During this testing I checked the contents of my Outlook Secure Temp folder (OLKCA) and at no time did any of the messages make it into this location.

Probably the IE cache subfolder is not needed for messages, appointments, and contacts in their “native” formats because Outlook is not handing them off to another program. I wonder whether Outlook creates temp files for those items in its own default storage location (possibly: Local SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftOutlook)? If not, then it must be internal to the PST/OST, or in memory, all of which are nearly impossible to search for unsaved items…

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