Office & productivity software forum: cannot save attachment. can't creat file in outlook 2003

Start MS Word (I assume you have that if you have MS Outlook), use File>Open, choose filetype rtf, browse to one of the many files you saved previously and press Open. Just like you would open any .doc, but this time it's an .rtf. Does this work? Then there's no need to despair about accessing all those files. If it doesn't work, what happens (please give the exact error message).

The other experiment: take an e-mail with a .rtf extension, and save the extension (without opening it, of course, just right click and choose save). Same with a .doc attachment. You say the first won't work, the second will. Tell exactly what happens with the first. An error message also?

I expect that you can both save and read the attachments this way. If not, we'll know - after your explanation - what you can and what you can't.

Kees

"right click the folder you want to create the file in and then click properties on the shortcut menu to check your permissions for the folder."
It's an unlikely cause, of course, if you are sure you can save files into that same folder any other way. But you don't write which folder, you don't write if a File>Save into that same folder from MS Word works, and you don't write if you did what the message suggested. Can't you save into ANY folder? How many did you try?

And you don't write what happens if you try to OPEN the attachment. Only what happens if you try to save it. It can hardly be the same message.

Did you try to disable or uninstall the Norton products (Norton Internet Security) you have installed, as suggested by Bob? It shouldn't make a difference, but with Symantec products you never know. And you must admit your Internet is rather secure if you can't open any attachment.

What happens if you do exactly the same opening and saving in Safe Mode?

Can you open and save other (not MS Office) files, like jpg and txt? Did you do a repair install of MS Office if it only are MS Office files?

Many things to try, many answers to give. You're not even half way.


Kees

on what you did and tried and what error messages come up. Still I assume you did and tried everything suggested above.

One last thing to try: System Restore back to when it still worked. Just a few weeks ago, shouldn't be a problem.

That leaves the idea of entrecon. Make a different user profile on the same machine, and see if Outlook works correctly there. It will show if it's a problem with your machine or with your profile only. If the last, delete your own profile (after doing the necessary backups) and rebuild it.

Kees

I just saw a note on this on another forum and they suggest rebuilding the user profile.

Have never done this myself...maybe someone else here can provide the process.

What worked for me as this was an Outlook issue..

Close all applications...

go to the start button, go to "search", do a search for "OLK*"
no quotes...

You may find OKL or OLK19, OLK with some number in the folder name.

Make a backup of the folder, "just in case". (that's just me, ultra careful"

Go into your OLK folder and delete everything in it. You may have files that you can not delete "because they are in use. No problemo. Just un select those files and continue to delete the rest of them. In the end, you may have 3 or 4 files that you can't delete. But who cares, we are not that fussy...

Once you have deleted the contents of your OLK folder, exit all open folders, re open Outlook and try to open the attachment you were having probs with.

Enjoy!

.....----===*Chris...


enter standard disclaimer here:

*NOTE*

This worked for me. I take NO responsibility if it does not work for you. Before doing anything, "make sure you have a backup".

The solution for unable to open PDF attachments from outlook has now been resolved after deleting files from OLK folder.

revealed to me that when Outlook saves files into the OLK folder, if the file name exists already, it appends "(##)" to it and increments from 1 through 99. In my instance, there were 99 instances of the same file in the folder. Apparently, it is not set up to increment beyond 99, hence it cannot create the file and gives the errors.

You can get the same error listed above if you have opened 100 attachments with the same filename. Such as if you have a scanner that emails you PDF files with the name document.pdf . Outlook when opening this file will save a copy in the temporary internet files location with in the order document (1).pdf, document (2).pdf etc... but will not renumber higher than 99. Sooooo... deleting these files will fix you right up!

You are right! Name of files with same name can only be incremented from 1 to 99.

This is a huge issue with people who review the same file a gazillion times everyday. User was not happy with me telling him to delete files every so often. Oh, well...

Thank you all for help.

"cannot save attachment. can't creat file in outlook 2003"

Your issue differs but is "PDF, excel and word files attached to an Outlook message (rich version) cannot be opened by receivers."

For that you go to the receivers machine to install PDF, excel or word "viewers" as well as train them to save the file first then to open the saved file.

Seems simple enough.
Bob

"I think that the problem is in the receiver's computers." as I've seen this far too often and resolved it too many times over the years.

Yes indeed. I see and open the attachments from my Sent Items. I sent them to me w/o problem and opened them.
I didn't ask so far recipients to forward me back the message.

My Outlook 2007 is sending through a POP3 SMTP Gmail account. I sent it from my Outlooik to my Yahoo account and tried to forward back the email with the attached PDF file and this is the message I got from Yahoo "There was a problem! Not sure why, but our usually-reliable server goofed-up while sending this message. Please try again." I tried again and again and I got the same message.
The same attachment, sent directly from Gmail, was got and opened by recipients w/o problems. I do not know how, but my feeling is that Outlook is corrupting the PDF file when sending it.

All worked fine with Outlook 2003. Something went wrong when I upgraded to Outlook 2007. Following your suggesgtions, I sent the same PDF attachment twice: first from my O2007 and afterwards from Gmail. The recipient got the first one, from O2007, as a file named "inmail.dat" and the second arrived w/o problem and opened as usual. I asked to forward me back the "inmail.dat" file, and I got the original PDF which was sent by me. Do you have any clue what is going on? Thank you

Tkx. I will change to HTML and check if this tackle the issue. I will post the results.