Attachment not found

[kcpant]

Hi Friends,

A mail setup : mail client- MS outlook, Mail server- Sendmail , relay server ( mail service provider's mail server)- Qmail, No. of users-140.

Most of the users are local (at HO), but 40-50 users are remote in different locations.Now, when a HO user sends a mail with an attachment, all users but 4-5 are getting this mail with attachment. those 4-5 users are getting the mail, but without attachment, and all of them are remote location users.How and why this happening, can anybody suggest me?and any solution to resolve this.

the mail path is as follows:

mails inside HO: outlook > sendmail server > recepient's account > reciepient's outlook

mails from HO to remote locations: outlook >sendmail >relayed to MSP's qmail server > remote client access/ download mail through POP

thanks in advance...

[Stuart Browne]

If it's the same users every time, it's time to do a bit of log reading. Send a message, and follow the log trace from the '/var/log/maillog' on the HO server, through to the conversation with the QMail server, and to the user POP'n the message off.

Also ensure that the user's Outlook isn't limited to the size of message it can download (it's one of those advanced options somewhere).

Things to check other than logs though:

* Maximum message size on both Sendmail side of things, and QMail side of things.
* User quota's for mailboxes involved
* Transient network failures at the time the users Pop

[Stuart Browne]

Oh, and the obvious one I forgot all about..

Make sure that the attachment type isn't of a type which those users's version of Outlook will deny access to, i.e. .EXE or .COM file.

[Gopi Sekar]

if it is different users every time then it could be issue with network transfer.

but if it is same set of users all the time, then the most likely issues are:
* some sort spam filtering at the client's email client which blocks all the attachments
* mail box full
* qmail is not configured correctly for these users
* some thing wrong with user's outlook express configuration

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[kcpant]

Hi SB & Gopi,

Thanks for a prompt reply. Now I think it's problem related to network transfer, because the user set changes every time. Also, there is no limitation of user quota, limitation of attachment size is ten times than the size of current attachment, and I have'nt found any problem in my sendmail log for those users.
One interesting thing I found is, when I ask those users to forward me that mail,these mails show a 'winmail.dat' file of exact size the actual attachment was, if I check the mail through linux mozilla client.But if I check this mail through MS outlook, I don't find that winmail.dat, and the size of mail is total size minus size of attachment. let's say , the mail is 360 KB having .xls attachment of 340 KB. when I check in mozilla, it shows a winmail.dat of 320 KB, but if I forward same mail to my MS outlook, it shows the mail size only 20 KB, without having winmail.dat inside. pl suggest any clue...

[Gopi Sekar]

Check these links:

http://www.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm

looks like the winmail.dat is one of the biggest problems on outlook express :), just do google search for winmail.dat and you will end up with so many reasons and solutions

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[kcpant]

Hi Gopi,

Winmail.dat file is not related to Outlook express, but it's a file related to MS Outlook/ MS Exchange, which is generated when we use RTF in MS outlook. I can view the winmail.dat file through WMdecode, and I found that it contains the whole xls file which was sent as attachment.But why I'm not able to get the same if a recieve same mail in MS outllok, is still a question. Now, I think it's some settings/ compatibility issue between MS outlook RTF & qmail. I'm just going to check out, and will post you my obervations.

thanks for reply

[kcpant]

Closing threads open from a long time....