I hate it when they do that!

I hate it when someone tries to overprotect me or tries to tell me what I am supposed to do (or not to do) with no easy way of making my own choice!

Microsoft Outlook has this nasty behavior in an extremely annoying feature: for some reason unknown to me, Microsoft has decided which attachments to Outlook items are “safe” and which ones are not.

For those that are not, Outlook has a friendly message for you:

“Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments: […]”

Know what? Thanks for offering protection and trying to keep me out of harms way but I think I really, really, really want to get to that attachment! Any why, oh why did you not put that into the other options that Outlook allows me to configure?

You are allowing me to switch on or off Message Header Shading when reading a message but you are not allowing me to switch on or off if I want you to block potentially unsafe attachments? And you are not doing this since when? Oh – you never did ask but cause that problem over and over again for years now? Cool… here is how you can get around it:

1. In case Outlook is running, close it.
2. Click Start, then launch regedit.exe via the Run… item in the Start menu.
3. Navigate the Registry:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office \ MajVer.MinVer \ Outlook \ Security

   where MajVer.MinVer is the internal version number of the Outlook Version (Office Version) you are running: 14.0 for Office 2010, 12.0 for Office 2007, 11.0 for Office 2003…

4. Create a new String Value and name it Level1Remove
5. Edit the new value, entering the file extensions you do not want to be blocked automatically: .exe if you want to unblock executables. Or concatenate multiple extensions: .exe;.url if you want to unblock executables and URLs.
6. Close the Registry Editor and restart Outlook

Form now on, Outlook will not prevent you from accessing the information you need to access – but be aware: this change is at your own risk, I am not assuming any responsibility whatsoever should you catch a virus, mess up your computer in any way or simply don’t want to deal with the registry!