email problem - MIME format attachments?

[redcrx]

Can anyone offer any advice.
I use Microsoft Office outlook for company emails.
recently when receiving some emails (now about 80% of them) the attachements (usually CAD files but some pdfs) have been missing and instead the email contains the file in something called MIME.
can anyone help me find out why and to stop it happening again?

[redcrx]

thanks Zacs, but that make no sense to me whatsoever lol.

any idea how to stop it doing it? it cant be a system my customers have set up as non engineering senders are having same effect.

as far as i know my software wont work this way, its an engineering program for running our machines and is just capable of importing DXF and DWG to save me drawing on the basic CAD that it has. Its not even 3D

[redcrx]

thanks anyway, at least i now know what it is lol.

I have had to get one customer to send to my hotmail account and when ive then forwarded the email its come through fine.

Its very irritating though.

[rojash]

Ah the wonders of abbreviations:

MIME is short for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, a specification for formatting non-ASCII messages so that they can be sent over the Internet. Many e-mail clients now support MIME, which enables them to send and receive graphics, audio, and video files via the Internet mail system. In addition, MIME supports messages in character sets other than ASCII.

Sounds to me like a problem with your e-mails getting corrupted in transit.

[redcrx]

any ideas how to find out or how to fix it rojash? we dont have an IT department as only a v small firm. I still dont understand why emails arent always affected.

[rojash]

Which version of Outlook are you using and which operating system?

There seem to be lots of references to this problem when using Outlook 2003 on Vista machines.

[rojash]

Also, who's your service provider for e-mail?

[redcrx]

Hi Rojash,
We are using outlook 2003 on xp professional.
The email provider is (i think) 1and1

[rojash]

The only things I can suggest:

Ensure that your have all the service packs and hot-fixes for Office 2003 installed.

Check to see if the problem is with the sender. (i.e. get someone else to send the same attachment and see if you receive it OK).

Try temporarily switching to another e-mail client (such as OE or Thunderbird) - you can set the account options to "Leave a copy of the message on the server" so that you can try collecting messages in both clients. This will help to narrow the problem, insofar as if you can receive OK in another client but not in Outlook, it's a fair bet that it's an Outlook problem, whereas is the problem persists across clients, it's likely to be a problem with the sender or your ISP.

[rojash]

It's also worth running a disk cleanup. A number of MS products in the past have exhibited weird behaviour when the temporary files folders contain a lot of stuff.

[redcrx]

thank you rojash,
I am in the main office tomorrow and Wednesday so will sit and go through those points.