Unable to display embedded attachment in Outlook

[1bulldog007]

I have a wierd issue. One of my clients uses their camera phones to send pictures to their Outlook 2003 client. They are on ATT and send the pictures via MMS. Until about a week ago(they claim) and verified about 2 months ago, they were able to see these pictures in their email and save them to their computer. Now Outlook does not seem to recognize the attachment. IT IS NOT BEING STRIPPED or FILTERED OUT! I capped that because so far that is anyones best guess. Here is why it is not. If that message gets forwarded to a web-based email account, (tested with gmail and hotmail) the picture is displayed in the original message. Also, OWA will show the picture as well. So the picture is in the email, but it is not visible to Outlook only. I have tested this on Outlook 2003 as well as 2007 on different networks.

If the message is emailed, it will show up from a pda phone. The issue is that some of the users do not have that capability on their phone. Test from a Verizon phone using MMS to the same Outlook clients have no issues. I contacted ATT who claim it is not a network issue and that it is a setting on Outlook. If true, then what is the setting? More importantly, what changed on ATT's end? I viewed the source of the emails and the code does appear different. The one that was received in definite HTML, the one that did not show the picture appears to have a different layout with some similarities. Nothing has changed on the clients end. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[goombawaho]

I'm not sure what happened, but it's not AT&T because, as you said, the picture is still there if the email is forwarded, so it's not like AT&T stripped your attachment.

Anything to do with this setting:
It's based on the format of the message. Rich Text format messages show the attachments in the message body while Plain Text & HTML mail messages show the attachments in the header

OR

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289972

 

[JockMullin]

I have had problems with hi rez inline images in Outlook sometimes not displaying.

Consequently I always try to limit the size of photos to at most 800 pixels wide if they are embedded, and make them attachments if larger.

What is the resolution of the image your cust is using? Did they get a new phone or has their image size increased? Maybe send a 600x800 to their phone and get them to forward it.

Jock

 

[1bulldog007]

Thanks for the replies. Ok here is another kink into the issue. It appears to perhaps be less of an Outlook issue and more of an Exchange issue. I have changed from plain text, rich text to HTML without success. I lowered the picture size from 1600x1200 on my test phone to 640x480 and still no dice. I set up my gmail account to pop to my Outlook client. When I forward the email from my Exchange email account to gmail account on the same Outlook client, the picture appears as an attachment. Any thoughts?

 

[donb01]

You're using the words "client" and "exchange" in this thread. Are you sure the network administrator has not implemented a group policy that blocks the display of pictures from unknown or unapproved locations? Our IS department does that. ANY picture that comes in an E-mail from a website that we could not ordinarily surf to on the web will not show up. For example, geeks.com sends their sale flyer to my home address, which I can also retrieve from work. The images in the message will not show up at work because that site is blocked by our content filter.

I don't want to get your client in any trouble with their management, but here is one way you can try and test that theory:

Go to

http://www.hotspotshield.com

and download hotspot shield. This is a handy "free" utility designed for laptop users who have to connect on unsecured public WiFi hotspots - it creates a secure VPN tunnel to the web to secure your connection (and is a handy tool to bypass the corporate web content filter). Incidentally if the company has such a content filter it will probably block you from going to the site, so you might have to download it at home and bring it in on a USB stick or a CD.

Now that you have that installed, before you get carried away, send yourself a picture message and make sure your outlook receives it, but do not open it yet. Leave outlook open and fire up hotspot shield. After it tells you everything is complete and pops up the news window it does on startup you can go back to outlook and open the message - if the images show up they are being blocked by policy.

If you can't open the message because it can't talk to the exchange server now (hotspot shield 'temporarily' takes you off your corporate network until you tell it to disconnect) you may have to create another folder in your mailbox and copy the message in there prior to starting hotspot shield so it is available 'offline'.

This process works pretty good for me for troubleshooting purposes.

 

[withanh]

I am having the exact same issue. When a photo is MMS sent to my mailbox, Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 does not display the photo attachment. I know the hotspotshield.com trick will not work because when I use OWA from inside my network the photo attachment shows. It's also interesting to note that the attachment does show on a Blackberry as well, but does not show on an iPhone.

Does anyone have any other ideas to resolve this?

Thanks!

h

 

[goombawaho]

You should really start a new thread and reference this thread.