Outlook 2003 - How to prevent sending attachments in ms-tnef

[Jim Walsh]

I'm using Outlook 2003. The online documentation and the MSKB both say that
Outlook 2003 will convert outgoing mail to plain text with an accompanying
MS-TNEF encloded attachment if the sender has formatted the message using
Rich Text. But, that it will not do such encoding if the format is either
plain text or HTML.

That does not seem to be working for me. I have sent a message to my
web-based client from Outlook 2003. I have attached a Word document (with or
without the DOC extension) to the message. Regardless of whether I use HTML,
Plain Text, or RTF, my web-based client always receives the messge with an
attachment named "application.ms-tnef".

Seems to me that there ought to be a way to send messages with attachments
of arbitrary format to clients not using a MS e-mail program, and have them
receive them as a readable attachment, without having to use some special
tool to unpack the ms-tnef object.

Thanks for your help.
Jim

 

[Vanguard]

I'm using Outlook 2003. The online documentation and the MSKB both say
that Outlook 2003 will convert outgoing mail to plain text with an
accompanying MS-TNEF encloded attachment if the sender has formatted the
message using Rich Text. But, that it will not do such encoding if the
format is either plain text or HTML.

That does not seem to be working for me. I have sent a message to my
web-based client from Outlook 2003. I have attached a Word document (with
or without the DOC extension) to the message. Regardless of whether I use
HTML, Plain Text, or RTF, my web-based client always receives the messge
with an attachment named "application.ms-tnef".

Seems to me that there ought to be a way to send messages with attachments
of arbitrary format to clients not using a MS e-mail program, and have
them receive them as a readable attachment, without having to use some
special tool to unpack the ms-tnef object.

What happens if you do NOT use Word as the e-mail editor and instead use the
built-in compose editor in Outlook?

 

[Jim Walsh]

Actually, I don't use Word as the e-mail editor, and always use the built-in
editor in Outlook.

Jim

 

[Jim Walsh]

I now have evidence that the problem may be due to our mail server, Exchange
Server.

I tried resending one of the test plain text e-mails with an attachment that
was received by the non-MS client with an application.ms-tnef attachment.
This time, I changed the sending server to COMCAST.NET. It was received by
the non-MS client with the original attachment unencoded, and readable.

Does this sound correct?

Jim

 

[Jim Walsh]

Well, I just closed Word entirely, and reopened it. The insertion point
marker is now back to normal. But, I am curious about what happened just
now.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jim

 

[Jim Walsh]

Oops...posted this in the wrong group.

Jim

Well, I just closed Word entirely, and reopened it. The insertion point
marker is now back to normal. But, I am curious about what happened just
now.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jim

 

[Vanguard]

I now have evidence that the problem may be due to our mail server,
Exchange Server.

I tried resending one of the test plain text e-mails with an attachment
that was received by the non-MS client with an application.ms-tnef
attachment. This time, I changed the sending server to COMCAST.NET. It was
received by the non-MS client with the original attachment unencoded, and
readable.

Is your company deliberately appending text to the body of your message,
forcing the [attempted] use of a background to have a letterhead, or adding
other content? While Outlook still screws up the received e-mails by
converting to its proprietary format so you really cannot see the TRUE raw
content of an e-mail, perhaps your webmail e-mail service has an option to
look at the source data of the test e-mail that you send to it through your
Exchange server. Then you can see if that attachment is really the MIME
part containing your attached file or some other content added by the
Exchange server.