Attachment encoding problem

P

Philip Herlihy

Attachments sent by just one of our users from Outlook 2003 (fully
updated) cannot be read by another user in Outlook Express. She can
receive attachments from other users (this isn't the security issue
where OE is hiding attachments that might represent a security risk).

Looking at the message source in OE I see this:

Content-Type: application/ms-tnef;
name="winmail.dat"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="winmail.dat"

I understood it's well-known that most user agents can't decode "Outlook
Rich Text" but the sending Outlook is configured to use HTML, not Rich
Text. I changed the global setting to Plain Text and all was well, but
setting it back to HTML brought back the problem.

I've worked around this for now by setting up a contact for the OE user
which forces Outlook to send as Plain Text, and attachments sent
subsequently can be detected and opened. However, I'd like a fix for
this, as the sending user prefers to be able to send colourful emails
and at the moment any other OE user won't be able to decode any
attachments she sends.

Any ideas?

This is one of those problems whose search terms are so similar to an
unrelated but common problem (alluded to above) that Google is no help
at all!

Phil, London
 
P

Philip Herlihy

Philip said:
Attachments sent by just one of our users from Outlook 2003 (fully
updated) cannot be read by another user in Outlook Express. She can
receive attachments from other users (this isn't the security issue
where OE is hiding attachments that might represent a security risk).

Looking at the message source in OE I see this:

Content-Type: application/ms-tnef;
name="winmail.dat"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="winmail.dat"

I understood it's well-known that most user agents can't decode "Outlook
Rich Text" but the sending Outlook is configured to use HTML, not Rich
Text. I changed the global setting to Plain Text and all was well, but
setting it back to HTML brought back the problem.

I've worked around this for now by setting up a contact for the OE user
which forces Outlook to send as Plain Text, and attachments sent
subsequently can be detected and opened. However, I'd like a fix for
this, as the sending user prefers to be able to send colourful emails
and at the moment any other OE user won't be able to decode any
attachments she sends.

Any ideas?

This is one of those problems whose search terms are so similar to an
unrelated but common problem (alluded to above) that Google is no help
at all!

Phil, London

Noone has any ideas?

Phil
 

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