in message
This inability to open attachments just started after the last big
update. I
can't believe it has to do with Google desktop. Has anybody else
had this
problem? There must be some setting in Outlook that is preventing
us from
opening attachments.
And how to did you come to that technical conclusion? Outlook doesn't
open attachments. Whatever "handle" is assigned to the filetype is
what shows the file.
To open an attachment, and to do so within Outlook, the file has to
exist. Files are not attached or floating around the ether somewhere
waiting for you to yank them out of the blue. There are no files in
any e-mail. All "attachments" are encoded within text sections inside
the body of the e-mail. To recreate a new copy of that file from that
encoded text in the body of the e-mail, that MIME section gets
decoded. But, again, WHERE would anything "open" the recreated file?
From the hard disk (or possibly from a memory-only copy). Outlook has
to decode the encoded MIME part to recreate the file. It saves that
decoded file to, well, a file on the hard disk in a temporary folder
for use by Outlook. Well, if anything interferes with reading that
file from the hard disk then it interferes with viewing the contents
of that file. Guess what Google Desktop does. It indexes files. To
index them it needs to open them. To open them means having a handle
on them. I doubt Google Desktop employs the Volume Shadow Copying
service available in Windows XP and beyond to ensure that it doesn't
interfere with other programs attempting to access the same files.
