Outlook 2019 Default Save Location

JoshRouthier
Contributor

Forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere, but I couldn't find anything about this off the bat.

As I am sure many of you have dealt with, users don't check where they save an Outlook attachment, and the user ends saving the attachment to the Outlook temp folder. Does anyone know if there is a way to specify the default save location (command or config profile) for Outlook attachments? Looking to save my users some lost work and hours.

Thank you for any help that can be provided!

2 REPLIES 2

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

You're definitely not the first to ask this question.

Microsoft has been trying to determine the best way to handle this. It's not easy because parts of this process are out of its control.

When a user double-clicks an attachment in a received mail message, it's downloaded to the Outlook temp folder and then the Finder determines which application to use and opens it. If the file is a Word document, for example, then Word can't save into Outlook's temp folder and the user receives an alert message. The user typically doesn't pay attention to the alert and just saves anyway.

The currently implementation of Outlook for Mac doesn't allow editing within the mail message itself. And because of Apple's increasing security, this isn't likely going to be allowed. With security features like Apple sandboxing and the new Privacy Preferences Policy Control, Outlook can't simply save anywhere.

Microsoft is in touch with Apple about this problem. It's really something they need to solve together. In the meantime, add your vote to this feature request on UserVoice: https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/293343-outlook-for-mac/suggestions/11130708-change-default-save...

sshort
Valued Contributor

@JoshRouthier I haven't found anything for Outlook, just the Office-wide setting to prefer a local disk location over OneDrive. At a $previousjob the workaround was to create an alias for the Outlook Temp folder on the dock, or someplace easily accessible like Documents so that users wouldn't have to peck around as much.

Poking around, it appears Microsoft changed the temp Outlook file location from 2016 to 2019. Not sure where it lives now...