Word attachments becoming corrupt.

[Charlie]

Hi

This problem exists on Panther running Office 2004, 11.2.
The user receives messages in Entourage with Word attachments and many of
them won't open, as they have apparently become corrupt through the mail
process.

Here is the reason I haven't posted this as an Entourage problem yet:
She also would send messages with Word attachments and those messages would
not even reach the recipient, though they seem to make it to the SMTP server
since she gets copies in Sent Items. This problem was also happening when
using Mac Mail or even our Webmail client, not just Entourage. (Our mail
server is IMAP, by the way.) The user claims that if she uses Thunderbird
she doesn't have the problem, but I'm skeptical.

The only measure we have taken, other than making sure Office is up to date,
was to fix the file permissions in OSX, since that seems to magically take
care of many application problems.

I have no idea what might be causing this, but I hope someone else does.

Thanks much.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Charlie,

Re receiving corrupt attachments:

Entourage has a setting in Preferences to "partially download messages over"
a certain size. Since attachments are often larger than the set size, they
only get partially downloaded, and thus the user thinks they are corrupted,
when really, they are just still on the server. That sounds like the case
here. (I think Entourage should offer some sort of "download completely"
link in the message, in that case, but not sure. )

Re sent attachments not being received:

Excessive spam protection on the part of the recipient? I've noticed that
when I send from an SMTP server that doesn't match my university email
address, anything I send to people at my university gets caught in a spam
trap and never arrives.

Tell her to run some tests sending mail to herself, or to a gmail address
set up for the purpose, etc.

The only way that I can conceive of this being a Word problem *might* be if
she had a macrovirus in her Word documents, and the recipient's protection
was scanning it.

 

[Charlie]

Great.
The information regarding Entourage sounds very plausible. I'll give that
fix a try on Monday when I'm back at work.

As far as the messages that weren't reaching recipients using various e-mail
clients - I think maybe the OSX file permission fix may have solved that
because I believe it stopped happening once I did it. They weren't being
flagged as SPAM because our Enterprise Spam filter simply puts the messages
into a Junk folder in th user's mailbox, which we would have seen when
test-sending to her own account.

I'll let you know how it works out.

Thanks much.

 

[Charlie]

I forgot to mention that this happens to the user on campus (oh, I guess I
didn't mention that I work at a University as well!) using our SMTP servers.

 

[Charlie]

I think the fix for the partial download problem worked, because we haven't
heard back from the user for a while now.
The other problem where sent attachments were never received may have been
fixed by the file repair, since it never happened again from that point.

Thanks very much. You saved me a lot of time. Now I can go back to server
and network problems and be glad that I don't have to know all the stuff that
it takes to support desktop apps!