Why does Microsoft Outlook not like MATLAB's .MAT files?

61 views (last 30 days)
Hello All,
This is not a MATLAB question but I would really appreciate any comments.
In my experience, outlook blocks .mat files sent as email attachments. One way we have managed to work around it by changing the file extension.
If you encountered this or a similar problem, or have elegant solution to the problem please comment. Also, we might want to report this issue to both Mathworks and MS Office collectively as a user group.
Thanks for your time.

Answers (3)

Vishal Rane
Vishal Rane on 21 Jun 2013
What type of attachments are blocked depends on the internet policies of your company. I have personally not faced any problems sending any type of matlab file as attachments either thru outlook or other email applications.

Andreas Goser
Andreas Goser on 21 Jun 2013
Edited: Andreas Goser on 21 Jun 2013
MAT is also an extension used for Microsoft Access Tables. I am only aware of this solution document for working in MS Windows. I have not heard about issues with sending MAT files.
  1 Comment
Tom
Tom on 21 Jun 2013
I had the same problem with sending .mat files from work to home- I had to download the attachments through GMail rather than Outlook as Outlook blocked them due to their being 'unsafe' - I never found how to set the security settings in Outlook to let me open them.

Sign in to comment.


Daniel Shub
Daniel Shub on 22 Jul 2013
Microsoft considers the MAT extenstion to be a Microsoft Access Table Shortcut. This file type can contain scripts and code and therefore is considered a Level 1 unsafe file type.
More information can be found at:
If your Outlook is part of an Exchange Server, I think you might be screwed. If you are incontrol of your Outlook, you can enable the use of Level 1 files by editing the registry. You need to be careful when editing the registry since you can screw up your comptuer. The key you need to edit is called Level1Remove It will be located/needs to be created in
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\XX.X\Outlook\Security
where XX.X is your "version" of outlook (14.0 is 2010). You want to add append .mat to the Level1Remove key value (use commas to seperate different values). You then need to reboot.

Categories

Find more on Manage Products in Help Center and File Exchange

Products

Community Treasure Hunt

Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!

Start Hunting!