Attachments vanishes

[Johannes]

I'm running Vista Business and use MS Windows Mail.

Sometimes when someone sends me an email with an attachment, like a word document, the attachment does not appear in the
email even though the email shows a large size. When I look at my email inbox on my ISM website, I see the email there
with an attachment called Windows.dat. I cannot open or read this attachment. I assume this attachment is the original
word document but transformed into a .dat format. When I ask the sender to re-send the email and attachement, it gets
through correctly.

Can anyone explain what's going here?

Many thanks,

Johannes van Vuren,
Cambridge, UK.

 

[Gary VanderMolen]

The explanation is here:
http://email.about.com/od/outlooktips/qt/et121705.htm

The basic problem is that Outlook, by default, uses a proprietary
form of encoding for attachments, which is not readable by
non-Outlook mail clients.

 

[Johannes]

Thanks Gary for your help.

I get this problem from only one correspondent who indeed uses Outlook as his email client. All his Outlook settings are
in accordance with guidelines in the website you pointed to. Strangely, not all the documents he sends to me vanishes
into the windows.dat blackhole, only some. When a document does vanish and he re-sends it to me the document always gets
through OK. Can there be something faulty with my vista windows mail client?

Johannes.

 

[Gary VanderMolen]

No, it's not anything Windows Mail is doing or not doing.
Your correspondent is probably not correctly following the
guidelines for avoiding this problem. Just tell him to always
use plain text format when sending an attachment to you.

 

[Steve Cochran]

Its also possible that the emails are going through an Exchange server which
has a setting to send everything as RTF. See if that is the case.
Otherwise see Gary's response.

steve