How to delete Outlook temporary folder

Published Tue, Jul 8 2008 8:39

If you receive a "File not found" or  "Impossible to open file" when you try to open an attachment from an email, the problem is that the temporary folders used by Outlook are full or the content is garbled.

Where are these folders ? The location is stored into registry in different places for different Outlook versions:

  • Outlook 97  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Outlook\Security
  • Outlook 98  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.5\Outlook\Security
  • Outlook 2000  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Security
  • Outlook 2002/XP HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Security
  • Outlook 2003  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security
  • Outlook 2007  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder

Another problem is that the folder is named OLK (until Outlook 2007) followed by random 2 numbers "or" 2 letters. So is quite impossible to know which is the correct name. For example on my pc with Office2007 the folder name is 3W8Z6AWR.

At the end the better way to clean those folders, is to read the value from the registry and manually delete the folders.

Or use a graphical tool like OutloookTools.

OutlookTools | HowTo-Outlook

 

by Adriano