Losing Outgoing Attachments (2000)

Topic

New Reply

I am using Outlook 2000 on Windows XP.
I am currently unable to send attachments. They appear to attach fine, and in both the “outbox” and the “sent items” folders, it shows them as attached. But they are not on the email that the recipient receives!

I just noticed this in the past week. I THINK it was working fine before, but I’m not 100% sure of that (I do email from several computers).

I have tested this on email sent to myself at a couple different addresses and viewed on two different computers. Outlook Express received just the message with no evidence of an attachment. AOL received an attachment called “Winmail.dat”, which was not the title of the document I attached and which was a bunch of gibberish when I opened it in Word.

Any clues how to resolve this?
Thanks,
-cynthia

Reply | Quote

Replies

This initially sounds like an issue at the recipent end, unless you have a virus that results in all your recipients blocking your att’s. Have you tested with a number of recipients on different mail servers? What kind of attachments are you sending? Is this a standalone machine or on a server?

Reply | Quote

The sending machine is a standalone (my home computer). I have NortonAV installed and up to date.
I use Outlook for my personal mail, and my email ISP is gwi.net. I tried sending it to myself at both my work address @ibew1837.org (unionsites.org ISP) and a second personal address @aol.com. The attachment was an MS Word document.

I received the work sample on both my home computer and my work computer with the same results – no attachments (I use Outlook Express for my work email). I received the aol.com sample on my work computer, with the results described in the original email (checking it both on the aol website, and then ultimately downloading it onto my work computer using the aol software and connection). My work computer is networked with three others, and we have a network version of Norton AV installed and up to date.

I just checked, and I do have emails on my work computer with MS Word attachments that I have confirmed by the headers were sent from my home machine (using Outlook and the gwi.net account). So apparently this is a new problem.

I’ll experiment with sending things to a few more people and see what happens. But I won’t be at that computer again until Wednesday or Thursday, so it’ll have to wait until then.

In the meantime, the above information (especially the experience checking via the aol website) is what leads me to think the problem is in the sending machine/program. As far as I know, I am not having any trouble sending attachments from that same machine using Outlook Express from the @ibew1837.org address. If this additional information offers any clues…..
-cynthia

Reply | Quote

A winmail.dat attachment is strong evidence that you sent your message in RTF (“rich text”) format (AKA “TNEF”). Better to use plain text or HTML unless you know the recipient is using Outlook. If you intended to compose your message as plain text, not RTF, there is a way that it can automatically flip to RTF based on a setting for that recipient’s address in your address book.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for that tip. I’ll look into that. I always used to use Word as my mail format, and may have switched because with Office 2000 it seems that some weird things happen if you are using Word for the email and have Outlook and Word open at the same time (which I often do).

I’ll be back at that computer Thursday and will investigate then.
-cynthia

Reply | Quote

Jscher2000 – You were right on the RTF idea. I have changed it back to Plain Text and Word for editing, and now the attachments are going through just fine. If I have trouble with Word getting flaky again, I’ll try HTML, although I subscribe to a couple of email lists which require plain text posting which is why I’ve avoided that setting.
Thank you.
-cynthia

Reply | Quote

For what it’s worth, I use plain text and Outlook for editing. Some nice features of Word are missing, but lots of bugs are avoided.

Reply | Quote