Where are attachments opened inside Outlook Stored?

One of my users had received a document via email and for some reason instead of saving the document and then editing it, he opened it straight out of Outlook and started updating it. Having lost documents in the past due to not saving them continuously, he kept on saving his edits every 5 minutes. 2 hours later, when he finished updating the document, he closed it and went for lunch.

On his return, to his amazement, he could not locate the word document. After about 5 minutes, he realised that instead of saving the document to his computer first, he had started working straight from the email :(

Now how many of you have come across similar situations? Well, the mere fact that you are able to save updates to the document means that they ARE BEING SAVED SOMEWHERE. Just where is the mystery :)

Well the short answer is that they are stored in a secure temporary folder. The location depends on the version of Outlook you are running and can be easily found by looking at some registry values.

For Outlook 2010, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Security


For Outlook 2007, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

Outlook 2003, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security

The actual Microsoft document detailing the above can be found here

Hope this comes in handy