Deleting Attachments

[DFitz]

Is the following scenario a known problem, using Outlook 2002....

I have a user that wanted to delete an attachment to an unsent email. To
delete the attachment she right-clicked on the attachment file and clicked
on "CUT". She then updated the file she had just removed and re-attached it
to the email and sent it out. She happened to go back to the sent mail
message and found that the ORIGINAL attachment was back in the email along
with the new updated version of the file.

We have since done a test and found that even though the attachment appears
to be deleted from the message when using the "cut" option, it really is not
deleted and will reappear once you actually send it. Using the "remove"
option works as you would expect and the attachment is truely deleted from
the message.

Has anyone else seen this happen? This has the potential for big problems
for users! BTW, Outlook 2000 only has the "remove" option.

 

[DFitz]

With the exception of saving the attachment as you suggested below (because
the file was already stored on her harddrive) I followed your suggestion but
it did not remove the file. Again here is what I did, I right-clicked on
the file attachment and selected CUT, saved the message, reopened it and
file was still there.

The only way it really gets rid of the file, regardless of whether you save
the message after removing the attachment or not, is that you must select
the REMOVE option not the 'cut' option.

What is the 'cut' option supposed to do in this situation since obviously it
is not supposed to delete the file attachment from the mail message?

 

[Brian Tillman]

With the exception of saving the attachment as you suggested below
(because the file was already stored on her harddrive) I followed
your suggestion but it did not remove the file. Again here is what I
did, I right-clicked on the file attachment and selected CUT, saved
the message, reopened it and file was still there.

While this may not seem intuitive, it still makes sense, or, rather, I can
understand why it may work this way. An attachment is NOT a file until it
is saved to a file system and I wouldn't expect it to act as a file system
object until then.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Well, actually it is, but it's a temp file somewhere else.

Actually, it's not, until you open the attachment. I've checked.

 

[Brian Tillman]

One of us must not be understanding the other, then. The above is
correct.

What I mean is that as long as the attachment remains unopened in the mail
message, it does not get written to the Outlook Secure Temp Folder as a file
system object. When you double-click on an attachment to open it, Outlook
decodes it from the mail message and places it as a file in the Outlook
Secure Temp Folder and starts the associated application for the
attachment's file type, passing the file into the application as a parameter
so that it opens in the application. The file will remain in the temp
folder even after you close the application and the message. It may remain
in the temp folder even when you close Outlook, but it's supposed to be
deleted.