skip to content


E-Mail attachments are read only

The issue of the file being read only, only occurs in certain circumstances and it is to do with the way the attachment is opened from within the email itself.

We have tested this issue with MindGenius maps and Office documents i.e. word/excel docs and get the same results. In Outlook 97/98/2000 there can be several ways of opening an attachment, these are:

  1. The attachment icon may appear in the body of the email in the preview pane if it is a rich text email format, you can open the attachment by double clicking on it.
  2. On the status bar of the preview pane when the email is selected there may be a small paperclip icon which you can click on and open the attachments.
  3. You can actually open the email and the attachment will be displayed in the email itself where you can double click on it to open it.

 

On testing when you open the attachment from the preview pane (method 1) or by using the paperclip icon on the status bar (method 2) then the attachments that open will automatically be set to read only by Microsoft Outlook, whether they are MindGenius documents or Office documents and possibly other file types as well. This would appear to have been a bug in earlier versions of Microsoft's Office package and in particular the Outlook package.

If you are using these earlier builds of Microsoft Office then to open attachments without them being set to read only you would need to follow method 3, this is to open the email and then open the attachment by double clicking on the attachment within the open email, this will allow the attachments to open correctly without being set to read only.

This bug within Office/Outlook appears to have now been resolved in the latest release of Microsoft Office XP which uses Outlook 2002, if the issue is causing a problem and it is not feasible to open every mail to get to the attachments then we would advise on upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Office.