Over the last few days, I have explained why users keep seeing weird security problems which prevent them from opening documents. It’s time to do something about this, so that we can all get on with our work again.

The cause of the problem is quarantine flags being attached to documents, but nothing being able to take them out of quarantine. This forces you either to abandon using the Finder to open affected documents, using the app’s Open command instead, or to only use the default app set to open that file type. Either way, it’s a pain and counter-productive.

Here’s one solution: the first full release of my free utility Sandstrip. This simply strips all quarantine flags which aren’t set when the items have been downloaded from the Internet. You can now select multiple files and folders for it to scan. It won’t touch ‘genuine’ quarantine flags attached to items because they have come from an Internet source.

The snag with this approach is that all you have to do is open a stripped document with a sandboxed app, and chances are that the quarantine flag will be back. If your non-default app happens to be sandboxed, this works around the problem just once, I’m afraid, unless Apple were to change this sandbox behaviour.

Sandstrip version 1.0 is available from here: sandstrip10
from Downloads above, and from its own Product Page.

There is an alternative coming in a slightly later article here, which you may find even more helpful.