{"id":4259,"date":"2012-04-28T08:43:59","date_gmt":"2012-04-28T07:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4259"},"modified":"2014-03-20T15:27:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T14:27:10","slug":"how-to-unblock-mat-files-in-outlook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4259","title":{"rendered":"How to unblock .mat files in Outlook"},"content":{"rendered":"

A MATLAB user at Manchester recently sent me some code and data as part of a Condor<\/a> support request but Outlook helpfully blocked access to his .mat files deeming them potentially unsafe!\u00a0 It seems that Microsoft Outlook is afraid of matrices.<\/p>\n

I guess that the easiest way to proceed would be to ask him to resend his stuff as a .zip file but that would slow down the support query.\u00a0 I just wanted to stop Outlook being quite so paranoid and let me have access to those scary matrices.<\/p>\n

The fix is a registry edit (very user-friendly of Microsoft right?) so please don’t proceed if you are not comfortable editing the registry.\u00a0 The registry controls numerous aspects of the Windows operating system along with many of the applications you have installed.\u00a0 If it had a map then there would be huge areas labelled ‘Here be Dragons.’ <\/strong>Corrupting the registry could lead to an unusable operating system. So, the following is offered without warranty on a ‘it works for me’ basis.<\/p>\n

Open up regedit and navigate to the following\u00a0 (I’m using Windows 7 and Outlook 2007, location and procedure may be different for different environments).<\/p>\n

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Office\\12.0\\Outlook\\Security<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once you have the above highlighted, move your mouse to the right hand pane of regedit, and right click to get a context menu.\u00a0 Click on New->String Value<\/strong>\u00a0and create a key-value pair with<\/p>\n