Helient Systems :

by Julia Skochko
Desktop & Applications Architect

Affected Products:  Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

Problem:  Microsoft’s June 2017 update for Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016 may result in abnormal attachment handling. This presents as two issues:

Issue 1:  Attachments which contain two dots or an exclamation point in front of their file extension (e.g. Test.txt or Test!.txt) may be blocked as “potentially unsafe attachments” despite having safe file extensions (e.g. PDF, DOCX). When an attachment is blocked, the following message is displayed in the Outlook Infobar: “Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments.”

Issue 2: Embedded attachments (ones that appear as icons within the body of an Outlook item) cannot be opened. This affects attachments within RTF-formatted messages, calendar items, contacts, and tasks. Attempting to open these items produces the following error: “The program used to create this object is Outlook. That program is either not installed on your computer or it is not responding. To edit this object, install Outlook or ensure that any dialog boxes in Outlook are closed.”

Fix: Microsoft has released updated patches which resolve the issues introduced by the June security updates. Download links to the patches are available below: