Word attachments from Outlook corrupted to PART.001 file

[lewic]

Just started in tech support at company with Outlook 2000 running on Win 98, [MS Exchange server is running on Win2000].

One of our staff has an intermittent problem when sending Word [2000] attachments to some of our clients. The attachment is sometimes corrupted and the recipient gets a gobbledegook file called PART.001. If these are multiple attachments, they also arrive as a single PART.001 file. If the recipient forwards the offending email to our IT department, the attachment is stripped off.

There seems little rhyme or reason to this - the attachment can be sent OK from her colleagues PC, and the problem only affects a few recipients.
Checked IMAP protocol on server - was already set to Plain Text, and also set to Plain Text on her PC.

These recipients of the corrupted attachments are running Groupwise [version 4.1] which I understand is rather basic, but they are a large organisation and say they have never had the problem before. Some of the time they receive attachments fine from this member of staff, so its hard to see what the problem is. The attachments are usually around 1meg, sometimes more, so I wonder if there is a compatibility issue which only affects files over a certain size?

Unfortunately the recipient has not been very forthcoming in giving us details of what they have tried their end to fix the problem, and are suggesting it is our fault, to do with local Outlook settings on our member of staff's PC.

 

[joegz]

First thing I would try is try setting up a web mail account like Yahoo or Hotmail and then have the employee send the same message with attachments to that address.

If you have the same behaior then the problem is on your end. If the attachments arrive correctly then the issue may be on the recipients end. May be.

You may also want to look at what editor the employee is using. Using plain text or HTML works better with other mail programs than does RTF.

Also look at the address entry the employee has setup for the receipent. Make sure the option send in RTF format is not checked for the address entry. joegz
"Sometimes you just need to find out what it's not first to figure out what it is."

 

[Pocket]

Read the article "Q241538: How Message Formats Affect Internet Mail" on Microsoft's Knowledge Base. The section "Sending and Receiving Concerns" explains why these type of attachments are created.

Basically, as joegz explained, these problems are all related to sending mail in Rich Text Format (RFT). Doing this causes the message to be TNEF-encoded. TNEF is a proprietary Microsoft protocol that isn't understood by other gateways.

We are also running GroupWise (although not as old a version as the one you mentioned!) and experience these exact problems when TNEF-encoded messages are sent to us. Getting the sender to send mail in either plain or HTML format will usually resolve the problem.

Hope this helps.

Pocket