Working on a file from a mailbox

Shicky

Shicky

Shicky

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Joined
13 Jan 2007
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Belfast,Northern Ireland
Had a friend ring me with this query and it seemed I was unable to help so thought I might try you boffins.

Basically she opened her uni email (uses microsoft office outlook web access) opened an attachment (word file im guessing) and began working away on it. She repeatedly saved the document and was apparently never prompted for a location (I call bs on this.)

At one point she said there was an error, something with the word temporary in it - again wasn't too sure what this was on.

I had her do a search for the file name of the document she had opened. Also had her check local/appdata/temp and apparently it wasn't there either.

Im fresh out of ideas unless that error was some sort of clearing of temp files which goes on automatically or something. Any help greatly appreciated
 
She's right you wont be prompted for a location as the file is in your temp folder so words happy. I've done this before :o and its all gone, I even tried file undeleters as it was an assignment due in about 30mins before I realised I had just closed a file that hadn't been saved :(
 
tom_e said:
She's right you wont be prompted for a location as the file is in your temp folder so words happy. I've done this before :o and its all gone, I even tried file undeleters as it was an assignment due in about 30mins before I realised I had just closed a file that hadn't been saved :(
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Check your post count.
 
Open Regedit and go to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Version No.\Outlook\Security there is an entry in there for OutlookSecureTempFolder. Copy the value out and paste into the run command and it will open the folder containing her file.

EDIT

The folder cannot be seen by browsing through explorer etc so you have to do it this way.
 
You're on the right lines there.

OWA usually saves files like this into the temporary internet files, and then within a hidden folder further inside of that folder!

You're unlikely to be able to click through into it, even if you enable hidden folders and unhide protected O/S files in Windows.

What can sometimes work is to open a new copy of the document from the email, which gets stored in the temp internet files directory with a [2] after it or similar, then immediately click the 'Open' option in Word and it may default to the hidden temp folder, allowing you to open the document that has been worked on.

Hope that helps!
 
CliffyG in terms of what you put in run, just the 0x0 (memory location im guessing?)

Also what can you expect you come up, surely not just a single file as it would be anything in the secure tempfolder?
 
Ahhh the amount of times people have come to me with this problem throughout my uni life (mainly girls). Despite trying everything I could think of on the net I could rarely find the file and I think when I did it was only because it was opened through an actual client not webmail.

Such a retarded mistake.
 
Ewaf said:
Ahhh the amount of times people have come to me with this problem throughout my uni life (mainly girls). Despite trying everything I could think of on the net I could rarely find the file and I think when I did it was only because it was opened through an actual client not webmail.

Such a retarded mistake.
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Agreed but you have to feel gutted for them also, weird thing is she is relatively computer savy so she'd be one of the last people i'd expect to pull this one out of the bag
 
Shicky said:
CliffyG in terms of what you put in run, just the 0x0 (memory location im guessing?)

Also what can you expect you come up, surely not just a single file as it would be anything in the secure tempfolder?
Click to expand...

It should be a folder location along the lines of c:\users\user\appdate\blah blah blah. If it was from web access though im not sure it's relevant.
 
People have done this at work (a school) many times, and it's just facepalm.

Feel sorry for the kids though :(
 
Lotus Notes does the same thing, if you just hit save it will save to a temp folder and of course after that you can never retrieve it. People at work do it all the time.

I don't think it's a particularly "retarded" mistake to make personally, people think they are saving the file to their computer and that it will be retrievable afterwards and you can easily see why. A "retarded" mistake would be putting your computer in front of a 3 bar electrical fire because it had "frozen"
 
Happens a lot.

The saves WILL commit in the temp location but further opening of the attachment will over-write it WITHOUT PROMPT with the original attached version.

You may be able to get at the file in the temp location assuming the above has not been done.
 
We get so many students come to us with this problem, and it doesn't help that we use roaming profiles so the only chance of getting it back is if they're still logged into the same computer they were using to save the file. One possibility is to open a different attachment, go to 'Save As...' and it will open the temp directory location where email attachments exist. If you're lucky there will be a version of the most recent save from the edited attachment and you can right-click on it to open it.
 
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