Ian D wrote:

"N. Miller" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 9 Sep 2009 07:47:01 -0700, mikelee101 wrote:

I'm seeing an issue that confuses me, and was hoping someone could give
me a
suggestion or two.
We use POP3 email at our office. Some users run Outlook while others use
Outlook Express. I am running Outlook 07. One of the Outlook Express
users
never receives attachments from me. The message comes through just fine,
but
no attachment. There is no .dat file or .txt file or any notice that an
attachment has been stripped, it's as if the attachment never existed.
Other
OE users in the office receive attachments from me just fine.

I think the solution is to not send RTF email. Something about how Outlook
encodes it, that Outlook Express can't decode. Probably a bug in MSOE, but
that application ceased development years ago. If the user can't be
persuaded to change to a more current application, you will have to
accommodate him.

The OP did say that other OE users in the office had no problems
receiving the attachments.

But was MIME or UUencode used to encode the RTF content (formatting) of
the message?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241538

As I recall, OE has a problem with TNEF when UUencode is used. Also,
the bug in OE's UUencode handling means that sometimes it works and
sometimes it won't. It depends on the content of the message and how
the UUencode block got closed (and, I think, something to do with proper
padding at the end).

RTF (TNEF) format should *never* be used unless:
- The recipient also uses Outlook since this is the only client that
recognizes Microsoft's proprietary version of RTF.
- Both sender and recipient should be using the same Exchange server (or
within the same Exchange organization/farm).

This means that RTF should *only* be used within the company and only if
needed (like to include Voting and other Outlook-Exchange functions).
The user should configure Outlook to always convert from RTF to plain
text (or HTML) when sending messages to external (Internet) recipients.

Development on Outlook Express died in 2002 with just a registry hack
added in Service Pack 2 for Windows XP regarding default placement of
the signature and quoted content). Only security updates were available
until 2006 when the development group was disbanded. Any bugs regarding
received RTF e-mails will not get fixed. The .dat attachment is usually
there (look at the raw source of the e-mail) but will not be displayed
in OE. If the MIME part for the winmail.dat content isn't in the raw
source of the e-mail then something upstream of OE is stripping it out.
Look in the raw source of the e-mail to see if the MIME part is there.
Don't rely on the presence or absence of the paperclip icon regarding
TNEF formatted e-mails.

You can use a viewer that will read that e-mail and show it with the
formatting applied that is specified inside the winmail.dat attachment
that has the RTF information. One such viewer is Winmail Opener
(http://www.eolsoft.com/freeware/winmail_opener/). I haven't used it
but it might find the MIME part and decode it anyway despite OE's bug in
not showing there is an attachment.