Microsoft Outlook attachment temporary storage and recovery of attachments

This morning i was searching my emails in Microsoft Outlook for an email with some attachment. Well bad luck ... i could not find the email and probably i deleted it. Here comes wonderful feature of temporary file storage to rescue. When you open an attachment in Outlook, application creates a temporary copy of this document on your machine. Each time you open the same attachment, a new copy of this attachment gets saved. These temporary files are located at following folder location.

C:\Documents and Settings\viper\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\8PVFOLU0

This path assumes that your OS is installed in C drive of your machine, which is the case for most users. Then you will look for user name under Document and Settings folder. For example in the path above, Viper is my user name. Only part of this path which is random is the last folder name. 8PVFOLU0 is randomly chosen when Outlook creates this folder. So in your case it could be different. So what you can do is, get down all the way to Content.Outlook folder and look for folders. One of those folders will have your files.

Your attachment files may not be there if:

• You have cleared temporary internet files folder
• You did not allocate sufficient space for temporary internet files and some of the content of outlook folder got trashed to make room for new content

Otherwise you are good to go and on the way to recovery.