ICS attachment as Untitled Attachment

[Kyle Griffin]

I'm having a strange issue receiving .ICS files on a particular Exchange 2003
server.

The problem only crops up when mail with a .ICS attachment is sent into the
server from an external mail server. The user will receive the email, but
the attachment shows up as and "Untitled Attachment" of type .MSG.

The odd thing is, though, that these attachments are indeed intact on the
Exchange server as the same user can access their mailbox through OWA and see
the .ICS attachment and download it from there just fine. It's only when
looking at the message through Outlook 2003 or 2007 that they see them as
untitled message attachments. Even stranger -- if they go to the file menu
in Outlook 2003 and choose "Save Attachments...", the attachments even show
up properly there in the submenu with full name and extension. But, if they
try to save the attachment using that method, it brings up a file open/save
dialog box reflecting an untitled attachment of type .msg being
downloaded/saved.

This problem doesn't occur if a .ICS file is sent between users on the same
Exchange 2003 server -- only if that message with the attachment originates
outside that Exchange server.

It wasn't configured before, but I have since gone into Global
Settings/Message Delivery to ensure that ics is defined with a MIME type of
text/calendar and stopped/restarted the SMTP virtual server, but that didn't
have any effect. Intelligent Message Filtering is not enabled on this
virtual server either. There isn't any SMTP filtering happening on the
firewall, but that wouldn't a whole lot of sense anyway as going in through
OWA proves that the attachment is indeed intact.

Anyone have any ideas?


Kyle Griffin

 

[Steve Gullion]

I had the same problem until I explicitly set the mimetype of the ics file as "application/octet-stream". That solved it immediately, in my case.

This assumes that you are generating the ics file and attaching it programmatically and can therefore manipulate the headers.