Outlook places text files in root folder of C:\

[PhillipR]

I never received a response to the message I posted yesterday. Anyone out
there that may be able to help? Here's the description of the problem as
outlined in my earlier message.

-----original Post-----
All of a sudden I noticed that Outlook 2003 is creating plain text files of
every message received and saves them in the root folder of the C:\ drive.
This practice apparently started sometime in March of this year. By the time
I noticed what was going on last week, more than 20,000 text files had been
created. The files are anywhere from 1Kb to 15 Kb in size. More than 2.5 gigs
were taken up in the 20,000+ files that I found. I deleted them all, but
Outlook continues to create the files every time it downloads messages. The
file naming convention looks something like "s2hk.6n" but the only thing that
remains consistent is the first letter; all the other letters and numbers
including the extensions keep on changing as the files are generated.

Does anyone have any idea what causes these files to be generated? How do I
stop Outlook from creating these files?

Your feedback is appreciated.

Best Regards, Phil

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Well, I don't have any ideas, but let's see...What kind of email account
do you have?
Do you have any add-ins installed?

Patrick Schmid

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

are you sure it's outlook? OE used to do that in combination with certain
virus scanners or firewall. If it is outlook, what AV software do you use,
and is it scanning email? What about a firewall?

Do you have any addins installed for archiving email?

 

[PhillipR]

Yes, I'm sure it's Outlook 2003.

I'm using Norton Anti-virus and I have been using it for a while now--long
before Outlook started saving every email message I receive as a text file.
Yes, it's set to scan incoming email.

No software-based firewall other than the Windows firewall that comes with XP.

No archiving plug-ins. I have auto-archiving in Outlook enabled, but usually
when it activates I cancel it.

Like I said, I can't rember changing the configuration of Outlook in the
last few months and the mssages started saving as text files on my hard disk
drive sometime in March of this year.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Best Regards, Phil

 

[PhillipR]

Thanks for the reply. All the accounts are POP3 email accounts (there are
several accounts at different mail servers).

The add-in I'm using is Lookout which is an indexing and searching utility.
Also, when I installed the Google desktop it also added a plug-in in Outlook,
but I don't use it that much. Both these plug-ins were installed long before
Outlook started to save the text files on my C:\ drive, which started
sometime in March of this year.

Any ideas or suggestions you may have would be appreciated.

Best Regards, Phil

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Hi Phil,

Can you disable both and see what happens?

Patrick Schmid

 

[PhillipR]

I don't believe either one of them can be disabled without completely
unistalling them. And like I said, these have been installed much longer than
every incoming message started to get saved on my hard disk as a text file,
so they can't be the culprit.

Best Regards, Phil

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

I don;t believe it;'s the search tools - I would try disabling email
scanning first.

 

[PhillipR]

Yep, that seems to be it. I disabled Norton's email scanning and I haven't
seen any text files stored on my hard disk. They must have changed something
in one of their updates--go figure...

Now, try to get the Norton AV folks to respond to this issue... Wish me good
luck and lots of patience...

Best Regards, Phil

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Now, try to get the Norton AV folks to respond to this issue... Wish me

good
luck and lots of patience...

<lol> I think you'll have better luck asking for world peace.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I never received a response to the message I posted yesterday. Anyone
out there that may be able to help? Here's the description of the
problem as outlined in my earlier message.

-----original Post-----
All of a sudden I noticed that Outlook 2003 is creating plain text
files of every message received and saves them in the root folder of
the C:\ drive. This practice apparently started sometime in March of
this year.

This is most likely the fault of some add-in scanner you've integrated with
Outlook, like an antivirus or -spam program. Outlook itself is not doing
it.

 

[Chuck Yeager]

My problem started the instant I let Sprint install a wireless modem and software in my laptop.

Very first time I used it, I got an warning that the server I was trying to connect to (Sprint) had
the Bla Trojan Horse.

I can match times of the coincident to the minute.