IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note (WHAT IS)??

[Ron Bombard]

A customer has been emailing me adobe PDF attachements... at least thats what they tell me. But when I get the mail, it has a 80k unnamed attachment. I name it with a PDF
extension, but it won't open. I look in the file with a text editor, and the first line has "IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note" in it.

I'm not using a Microsoft branded email client.

Can anyone explain what this customer is doing???

Thanks
Ron

[Ron Kinner · Accepted solution]

This problem happens if the Outlook user is sending messages to you as rich text. This is the default if you're a
known user in Exchange. For "Internet recipients", it's configurable
on a per-address basis. Regardless of whether there's any rich text in
the message, the attachments come bundled in a single attachment with
a MIME type of something like "MS-TNEF".

Ask them to send you a new mail message by pressing Actions / New Mail Message Using / Plain Text

For a more permanent fix:

Tools / Options / Mail Format / Send in this Message Format: => Plain Text OK.

Ron

[Ron Bombard]

Thanks Ron. Very helpful.

I'll contact them immediatly.

[Ron Bombard]

Ok.... I contacted this company... and explained the situation to them. Their I.T. guy tells me this "These options are not part of MS Outlook 2000 which is what we're using"

Is it possible that you cannot turn off the Rich Text feature in Outlook 2000? He claims that he can change the message text to Plain-Text, but there's no place to change the setting for attachments...

I hesitate to believe him, because they've always been quick to lie to us before when it suits them....

[Ron Kinner]

They are right that there is no option to send the attachments in plain text. You just need to tell them to send the message in plain text. When you send a message in the fancy Microsoft rich text that is when the attachments are supposed to get hosed.

Ron

PS I have Outlook 2000 (SR-1 9.0.0.3821)too. Send me an email to rkinner (at) att (dot) net and I will reply from my company outlook with two messages with small pdf attachemnts. One will be in richtext and the other in plain and we will see if it really works as promised. I tried it with my att account but it seems to work either way.

[Jon Finley]

Just courious... Are you using Lotus Notes?

Jon

[Ron Bombard]

Nope... Not using Lotus Notes.

[Ron Kinner]

Just an update on this problem. Ron and I have run some tests using my own Outlook 2000 and his email program and we now believe that the problem is actually in the misconfigured Exchange server at his customer's site. Odd thing is that if he forwards the attachment to me I can read it without any problem and when I forward it back to him he can read it too! Anybody with Exchange experience have an idea what they did wrong?

Ron

[Ron Bombard]

After we tested this using your Outlook, I email our customer and explained that it works fine with "other peoples outlook".

All he had to say was: "As stated, these options are not available in the version of Outlook we are using. We have no plans to debug the process for every e-mail client on the market. As a result, you will need to use Outlook, or a Yahoo account. Since all other vendors are working fine, I can only assume this is an issue with Pegasus Mail client."

Pffft... all other clients.. they have 3. :) And they probably strong-armed them into using outlook.

Another note: I've tried opening these emails with PEGASUS MAIL, EUDORA MAIL, HOTMAIL, & NETSCAPE MAIL... none of these will open the email with ms-tnef encoding. So saying this is an issue with pegasus mail maybe be "correct", but a major cop-out.

[Joseph Kwong]

Hi Ron,

I came across this thread researching the same problem. Our venders were having problems reading our PDF's also. The source of the problem is your customer's configuration of the Exchange Server. I am assuming that they are using Exchange 5.5. Have them check their Internet Mail Service connector. There is an "Advance Option" button under the "Internet Mail" tab. From there you can specify to "Send Microsoft Exchange rich text formatting". There are three options, User, Always, and Never. When it is set to always, it will screw up the attachments. Once we set the option to User or Never, the attachments got through correctly.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Joe

[Ron Bombard]

Thanks Joe.


I found a document on MS's website with those instructions.... and emailed them them to the client.

His only response was: "our software doesn't have that option."

Jerk.