Category: Windows

We save emails to network server in specific job folders as .msg files to preserve all header info and attachments.

Recently found that I could only open the saved attachments once if I tried a second time it would give the following error:

Can’t open file: <file path>. The file may not exist, you may not have permission to open it, or it may be open in another program.

Permissions were fine for the files and if I closed outlook and reopened outlook, I would be able to open each message once but once closed and reopened I would get the same error message. If I closed outlook and left it closed, then I would be able to open and close the saved .msg file as many times as I wanted – i.e. normal file behaviour. The minute I opened my Outlook 2003 and then opened the .msg file it seemed to place some kind of lock on the file and never clear that lock until I closed outlook. If I looked at a list of all open files on the server, the .msg files in question were indeed locked out to my username even though I had closed the email viewing window. Continue reading “Outlook 2003 error trying to open .msg saved emails on server”