When you are utilizing Microsoft Outlook for business, you will get lots of emails on a single day. Some emails contain attachments having your important data. But there are some situations when you are unable to open these attachments. The prime cause behind this issue is security feature of Outlook. This feature denies opening attachments if it found that there is some virus or malware in it that can harm your system. Although, you can see attachments with emails but can’t open, edit and view them. However, Microsoft has provided some solutions so that users can access the database within attachments. Here, in this guide, we will know all possible ways by which one can open & access blocked attachments in Outlook. Before this, we will know the ways the email attachment can harm to users.
- Spamming
Spamming is receiving unnecessary emails that users don’t want but sender continuously sending them. Although webmail has separate folder for unwanted emails but it does not provide security to the data.
- Ransomware
Ransomware prevents receivers from accessing important files and sometimes they hack the computer and do not allow users to sign in. The victims of ransomware are asked for ransom money by notifying about the attack.
- Phishing
Phishing aims to share sensitive information. In this case, users feel that they have received emails from business and provide asked information.
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When users receive emails with attachments which are blocked by Outlook.
There is no doubt in it that the main way of spreading viruses is through email attachments hence Outlook block specific email attachments involving .exe and database files.
If you try to send these files in attachments to an Outlook email address or Exchange Server, you will get this warning message:
If you attempt to send attachments mentioned above from Outlook to web clients like Gmail, you will find this error message:
As we mentioned earlier, Outlook’s security feature block suspicious attachments which might harm your computer due to viruses. But sometimes, users get a genuine attachment from authentic sender and Outlook marks it unsafe and failed to open. In this situation, users need to look into matter for opening the attachment. But how to do this? For this, get solutions in the next segment of this article.
Solutions for opening blocked attachments in Microsoft Outlook
Here are available solutions by which blocked attachments can be opened in Outlook.
Method 1. Share attachments using File Share or FTP
You can ask sender to share file as link instead of attachments. You can use File share websites like Google drive, wetransfer, hightail, dropsend, dropbox, mediafire, and more. These platforms allow sharing files big as 20 GB. For sending files bigger than this size, subscribe to their premium features.
Method 2. Change file extension of attachments by compressing it
The sender can compress the blocked attachments and then send them. Utilities like WinRAR and WinZip can be used for compression task. By compressing attachments, the file extension can be changed to .zip or .rar which is not blocked by MS Outlook.
Method 3. By Renaming the file
If you don’t have access to third-party compression tool, ask sender for renaming the files, which is not considered threat by Outlook.
Method 4. Take help of administrator
If you are using Outlook on Exchange Server, then you might ask your administrator to change security of mailbox to accept blocked attachments.
Method 5. Change of security behavior
If you don’t use Outlook with Exchange or administrator does not allow changing Outlook security behavior, you can use this method.
- Close Outlook if it is running
- Hold Window + R keys and enter regedit in text field.
- Make sure the following registry keys exist in Outlook version:
For Outlook 2016,
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Security
- If registry key exists, you can skip next step
- If registry key is not already existed, create it.
- Click on following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft
- From menu bar, click on Edit tab and click on New key
- From Outlook 2016, type 16.0 and press Enter.
- On Edit tab, click on New and then > Key
- Type MS Outlook and press Enter
- On Edit tab, click on New and then > key
- Type Outlook and press Enter
- In Edit tab, click on New and click String value
- Enter following name for new value
- Press Enter
- Right-click on new stirring value name and hit Modify
- Provide name for file extension to open in Outlook.
- Click Ok to close registry editor
- Now, restart your computer
- Open MS Outlook and check for blocked attachments whether they are opening now or not.
Method 6. Professional Attachment Management Tool
If all the above explained solutions won’t work for you, try automated tool named Outlook PST Extractor to extract these attachments. This program is handy and allows extracting attachments from all Outlook emails. Its smart interface and fast working helps users to quickly extract attachments from Outlook emails. By this program you can easily open attachments which are blocked by Outlook because of security reasons. Also, users can extract desired extension attachments from emails of Outlook by the help of this program. We suggest users to check the program functions with free demo version.
Main attractions of this software are:
- Upload multiple PST files together to extract attachments
- Instant and fast working without restricting Outlook data file size
- Comfortably works even in the absence of Outlook setup
- Easy and smart recovery of attachments from Outlook database
- Filters to export desired attachments from Outlook file
Conclusion
5 manual tricks and one automated solution to open blocked attachments in Outlook is discussed in this valuable post. You should first check free manual solutions and if they failed to do needful, then opt third-party utility which surely works for you in accessing blocked attachments of Outlook emails. This software is well versed with smart features and performs instant recovery of attachments.