You learn something new every day. Or maybe every week. This week I learnt about Attachment Manager.

Remember how we wailed when, back in 2000, Microsoft patched Outlook to block extensions from dozens of file types that were useful, but dangerous err powerful. Initially the extra security was optional, but it came built into later versions of Outlook.

Some of us resorted to hacks like Attachment Options to tell Outlook to STFU and give us the attachment.

From XP SP2 they’ve replaced it with the Attachment Manager (via David), which provides an extra prompt when you try and open/run the file. The file attribute even survives the file being moved around, provided it’s on NTFS. And it covers numerous applications, including Outlook, IE and MSN IM.

In some cases it simply won’t let you open/extract the file. For those you need to go into the Properties and Unblock it manually. Just another hoop to jump through.