Outlook 2002 (XP) Can't Receive My Attachments (Mac)

ISSUE:

I'm using Macintosh Eudora. When I send attachments to users of Microsoft Outlook 2002 (Office XP), they don't receive the attachments OR don't get a paper clip icon to open the attachment properly.

SOLUTION:

This is a known bug in Microsoft Outlook 2002 (Office XP) that prevents them from receiving attachments from non-Microsoft products (Microsoft bug fix number OfficeQFE:4781). As of this writing, Microsoft has planned an update to fix the Outlook issue.

Until Microsoft fixes the issue, Eudora users have reported success with the following work-around. In your Mac Eudora, open a new message, then copy and paste the following text into that message-

<x-eudora-setting:9906>

The text will highlight in blue as a URL. Double click on it. In the new window that appears, change the following text-

from - %r: < %p>%p

to - %

Click Set Setting.

That should do it. Now Eudora will send out a mangled 'Content-ID' header to trick Outlook 2002 (Office XP) into correctly interpreting the attachment.

This change should not effect the way attachments are received by others who are not using Outlook 2002 (Office XP). However, if you experience issues, you can change Eudora's behavior back to standard behavior - simply copy and paste the x-eudora-setting into Eudora, double click on the resulting URL, and choose Revert to Default.

If you're interested in more information, you can learn more about this Microsoft Outlook bug at http://home.cwru.edu/~wrv/eudoraoutlookfix.html.

*** WARNING***

Changing this setting <x-eudora-setting:9906> from it's default, while it may solve the problem of some Outlook users not seeing your attachments, will have other undesirable consequences. Specifically, messages you send with inline images (including inline pdf files) will not display the image where you insert it as, without a properly-formatted Content-ID header, the receiving mail program has no idea where to insert the image inline. If you receive such a message in Eudora, Eudora will display text above the image that says:

"The following document was sent as an embedded object but not referenced by the email above:"

So basically you are trading one undesirable behavior for another. Seeing as Microsoft has fixed the problem in Outlook, the best solution is for the Outlook user to update to the fixed version.

KEYWORDS: EPMAC, ATTACHMENTS, PAPER CLIP, WINDOWS, SENDING, SEND