Cannot open .pdf files that have been saved from Outlook Desktop without unblocking

Question

In the past couple of months when we're saving pdf files from Outlook we cannot open them from our file explorer without unblocking them in the file properties first. Our process is to right-click on the PDF in the message in Outlook and "Save As" to our file location. We can preview and open the file in Outlook no worries, but when we head to the directory in our File Explorer at a later date it's showing as locked and we have to "unblock" them from the file properties before we can open them in our PDF reader.

We used to have this issue periodically saving from Chrome but we were able to add a registry edit to stop that, but we don't know how to stop this happening from Outlook.

Any files we are saving we explicitly trust so we don't know why it's suddenly started happening. It's been since early March.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi @Damien Peden - Linkup Paints ,

Welcome to our forum!

Does this issue occur with other attachments, such as .doc?

We used to have this issue periodically saving from Chrome but we were able to add a registry edit to stop that

According to your description, i notice that the issue also occurs with the PDF files saved from Chrome, so i'm afraid that it's not related to Outlook desktop client. In order to confirm this, it's suggested that you could try to configure your account in other email client, such as Mail, and then save the PDF files to check if you can easily open the saved PDF files.

If the issue persists, considering the impact of your current computer, please do the same test in other computer to check if there're any differences.

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.