How to stop automatic download of attachments with preview pane

[Tommy]

Outlook automatically downloads the attachments even though it does not
display it.
My users are sending back and forth some large excel spreadsheets and such,
up to 20 mb at a time.
I want to turn off that automatic downloading of attachments since when they
look at an email outlook just freezes and does not give any indication that
it is downloading something. The user thinks outlook either crashed or that
the mail server is slow. They usually save those large attachements to the
hard drive but outlook still downloads it in the background whenever they
look at the body of the email.

Is there a way to turn this off so that the download of the attachment only
occurs if the user specifically clicks on the attachment and selects open or
save?

 

[Jocelyn Fiorello [MVP - Outlook]]

If they're really attachments and not just sent as part of the message, they
should not be automatically downloaded, whether or not you have the preview
pane on. Do you have any add-ins installed?

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***

 

[Tommy]

It does not save the attachment anywhere or anything like that but it must be
caching the attachment because the outlook freezes while it is retrieving the
whole message. When its a 20mb message being downloaded though a shared 512k
or even full T1 circuit that can take few minutes. I probably should have
mentioned that we are using an exchange server not pop3.

I guess Outlook tries to be thoughtful and downloads the attachement, to
what I imagine must be a temp directory, ahead of time when you click on the
email. Then when after it is done and you try to access the attachment it
pops up faster. Problems are that a) it does it without asking and i cant
find a way to turn it off b) it does it every time the same email is
accessed, so it is not smart enough to download the attachment to a temp
directory and know that when the same email is accessed it does not need to
re-download the attachment and just use the one temporarily stored instead.

All this happens only if preview pane is enabled. If i turn it off and even
with auto preview enabled Outlook does not pre-download the attachments.
I looked though all the options and there is no option to disable this. I
searched the web and this site and also came up short.
I looked though registry and found nothing but that does not mean much since
I am not very good with registry changing.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I guess Outlook tries to be thoughtful and downloads the attachement,
to what I imagine must be a temp directory, ahead of time when you
click on the email.

It doesn't. The attachment is not actually a separate part of the message;
it is embedded in the message. It is not placed in a temporary folder until
you open the attachment, thus extracting it from the message.

 

[Attachements Preview]

Did you ever figure this out? I have an issue when you change focus to an
item that has an attachement. It is very slow, but only on my notebook pcs
that have offline folders.