Calling all geeks!

[annathepiper]

Hey, does anyone know of any known problems with Outlook 2002 not seeing attachments in mail? mamishka is having a problem with sending mail out (she's using pine on our Linux server), and twice now recipients haven't gotten the attachment. One of these recipients--me--is using Outlook 2002.

If I look at a mail of hers with an attachment in pine, though, I see it just fine. So I'm thinking it's probably Outlook 2002's fault.

Comments

[xpioti.livejournal.com]

Outlook may be blocking the attachment; I've noticed that mine does that sometimes, and will display a message in yellow at the top of the window. It may be due to our Exchange config, though.

[annathepiper]

Don't know about the other recipient--Meems tried to send her book off to the local small press publisher, and they didn't get the attachment. Don't know what their setup is, though.

Me, though--I know I didn't see any sort of alert like that on the message she sent me across our own house net.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I've got Outlook Express, but I think the problem is similar. You should be able to fix it by doing something like:

Tools -> Options -> Security

And uncheck the box that says "Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that might potentiall be a virus."

Then Apply -> Okay. You might have to restart the application.

[annathepiper]

That doesn't sound like it's quite relevant to the problem, though. That option sounds like to me that it wouldn't let you SAVE a suspect attachment on an email message; the behavior I'm seeing, though, is that there's no attachment coming through at all. So there's nothing to save out from the message.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Oh. Nebermind, then. :)

[annathepiper]

Thanks for the stab at it anyway, babe!

As it happens, I figured out what was going on anyway. :) It's an actual bug in Outlook!

[agrimony.livejournal.com]

Of course, PINE tends to put everything in MIME format, which other mail readers read as attachments, so if outlook is thinking that it is suspicious and refusing to display suspicious attachments, that could very easily be the case. It's certainly worth exploring, at least. :)

[annathepiper]

Turns out it's an actual bug in Outlook. The attachment was actually really there, it's just that the damn program wasn't properly displaying it! And the real kicker is that if you go to the "Save Attachments" command off the File Menu, you can save it out from there.

I posted a link to the relevant Knowledge Base article in a new journal entry. :)

[poetry-lady.livejournal.com]

If it's coming through to SOME recipients, but not others, it's the configuration on the mail server. It could be the size of the file, not necessarily the type of attachment. I would suggest having mamishka send a very small text file as an attachment, and if that works, a very small Word doc (I'm guessing she's sending a Word doc as an attachment?) or a small file of the type that's not being sent. If it will accept the smaller files, but not the important one, it's size. If it will accept text files, but not binaries, it's the file type. If that's the case, I'm not sure what to do. You could try renaming the file to a harmless extension, or try zipping it.

Hope this helps!

[annathepiper]

Turns out it's Outlook's fault. Which is what I was suspecting in the first place. ;) I tested this out this evening by making test messages in pine on my own lodestone account, and sending them to myself--my Outlook 2002 didn't see the message.

There is a known bug in Outlook 2002, according to Microsoft's Knowledge Base, with how if you get a message with an attachment off of a UNIX POP server--which is what we have--the message doesn't display the attachment right. But if you try to save the attachment out off the Save Attachments menu command, you can see that the attachment is really there! ;P

The bug's been fixed in a recent service pack. So even though it's a stupid bug, they've fixed it!