Hi all...

Is there an official way to have this bug looked at? 

(Note -- it is *not* the Exchange/PDF bug that has been semi-addressed with the very-recentInterim Update for Exchange 2007...)

If I set up Outlook 2010 to use an IMAP server account (not an Exchange account) and send that account a message from Apple's Mail.app program -- that contains an in-line attachment -- Outlook 2010 displays the e-mail incorrectly.

If I send e-mail using Apple Mail of the form:

<some text>

attachment  (and in this case I've tried .pdf, .docx, .xls, etc. -- it seems not to matter what the attachment is...)

<additional text>

<signature>

Outlook 2010 displays the resulting e-mail with a problem:

The received e-mail will look like this

<some text>

then *two* attachments -- the attached file *and* an "Untitled Attachment" that contains the <additional text> and <signature> parts of the e-mail (!)

The reproducible bug (at least here) is that Outlook 2010 should display the remaining text after the in-line attachment within the *body* of the e-mail message.

Again, this is *not* the recent Exchange issue with .pdf files -- this is strictly an Outlook issue.

Any thoughts/help on this one?

- Steve

Hello Steve,

Thank you for your question.

I am trying to involve someone familiar with this topic to further look at this issue. There might be some time delay. Appreciate your patience.

Thank you for your understanding and support.

Hello,
 
In order to get a better understanding of your issue I have a few questions:

1: You mention that the sending client is an Apple mail application. Do you see this issue when sending from a non-Apple email client?
 
2: Which version of Apple Mail app are you using?

3: If you send the same mail to an Outlook 2007 or earlier version of Outlook do you see the same issue?
 
4:  What is the format of the Email when being sent from the Apple mail client, is it HTML; Plain Text or Rich Text? Additionally, what happens if you send the same email but change the format.
 
5: If you send an Inline attachment to the Apple Mail application from Outlook 2010, what happens?
 
6: As per the Post you are attaching a single Inline attachment with text before and after the attachment before sending the email, but when you receive the mail in Outlook you get two attachments. Are these attachments still inline attachments?
 
7: The second file attachment; next to the remaining text and the signature does it contain any other text? Like some error added by the server?
 
9: Instead of .pdf, .docx, .xls file if you send an image as an inline attachment from the Apple mail application, then so you see the issue?
 
10: If you send the files as normal attachment not inline does everything work?
 
Below is an article which may be applicable to your issue although it pertains to an earlier version of Outlook:
 
‘Outlook renders inline message information as an attachment’
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814111
 
I also came across a user who experience similar issue and they suggested, setting the apple mail application to Always insert attachment at the end of the message.

View->Attachments and select "Always Insert Attachments at End of Message
 
Let me know what the results are using that setting.
 
Do let me know if you have any queries regarding the same and I shall try my best to address it as far as possible.
 
Regards,
 
Harveyy - MSFT

Actually, I now have an SR open with Microsoft about this (111050970814077) and answered most of the questions there.

But to answer your questions in a general way:

1)  Not a lot of other mail programs allow you to send in-line attachments, so I haven't looked to see if others do (maybe Thunderbird does?   I haven't tried that now that you mention it -- except to see that Thunderbird *received* the Apple Mail messages correctly.)

2)   Current (10.6.7) version of Apple Mail

3)  Outlook 2007 has the same problem, but the second attachment is named differently.

4)  No difference between sending Plain Text or Rich Text

5)  Did you mean Outlook 2011?  Outlook 2011 "works" -- the attachment is not shown "in-line", but the text after the attachment is in the body of the e-mail where it's expected to be.   This is how I expect Outlook 2010 should work.

6)  Outlook on Windows appears to not show *any* in-line attachments (probably because you can't create a message with an in-line attachment.)  Admittedly, I did not try every single file format as an attachment, though.

7)  No error in the second attachment.   Just the post-in-line text/sig file.

9)  I tried a .png file -- same issue with the post-in-line text.

10)  Yes -- sending attachments at the bottom of the mail (or attaching the message using the menu commands for attaching files -- which puts it at the bottom) works.

However, the solution doesn't necessarily function with the work-flow here.   We have automated tasks which craft e-mails with in-line attachments and post-attachment text.   Outlook (Windows) needs to be able to display the post-attachment text.

Hello,

Thank you for the update and I apologize for the delay in replying back. I did check the case number 111050970814077 provided by you and it shows that a Support Engineer is working with you on this issue.

As you have an activate case open with the relevant team, if it is fine with you we shall close this post and let the support engineer assigned to your case number 111050970814077 continue troubleshooting the issue with you.

Please feel free to reply back with any queries you may have for the above.

Hello,

Thank you for the update and I apologize for the delay in replying back. I did check the case number 111050970814077 provided by you and it shows that a Support Engineer is working with you on this issue.

As you have an activate case open with the relevant team, if it is fine with you we shall close this post and let the support engineer assigned to your case number 111050970814077 continue troubleshooting the issue with you.

Please feel free to reply back with any queries you may have for the above.

Hello Steve,

A request for escalation has been received on your support case 111050970814077, and we are in the process of identifying the best resource to assist at this time.  You will be contacted once one has been identified.

Once that support case is addressed, we will update this forum posting again with the resolution, or available workarounds.

Thank you,

Having the exact same problem. I have

<some text>

<companylogo.gif>

<signature>

In Outlook 2010 I receive:

<some text>

And a number of attachments:

companylogo.gif

"Untitled attachment 00194.htm" (containing <signature>)

2 more untitled attachement containing "blank" HTML-code:

<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><head></head><div><div><div></div><div><br></div><div></div></div></div></body></html>

I have the same problem. I have not changed a thing! then one day I had a client email one of my users via a MAC and it will not show up! If I check the message in OWA it shows up correctly if I check our GFI system it shows up just fine. It seems the problem is somehting with the MIME in the email "I'm not sure if this is a outlook problem or a problem with Apple Mail.

I did have the user send the message to a account I have setup with POP3 and it worked just fine with outlook 2007. I'm at a complete loss and would like someone answer this question. I feel someone sent a patch Apple or Microsoft and they aren't telling anyone!

This issue was just reported to me also with users not getting attachments sent from Apple Mail to Outlook 2010.  The Apple Mail user is doing a drag-drop to the body of the message of the attachment and then sending.

She sent the email with image attachment to 3 of us for tbshooting and it came through fine for me but the other to support folks experienced similar issues as described above. We're all running Outlook/Exchange 2010 at the same patch level and I don't know what other nuances of our installations could account for the different behavior.

I've asked her to re-send the email/attachment but do an "add attachement" this time - ok no difference - it came through to me fine but the other support folks get nothing. Interesting the message was forward to me by the other support person and I'm seeing the image file render in-line and not as attachment.

I still can't see any difference with my setup vs. the other folks but its consistent in that I'm not seeing any problems yet the other folks are.

Definitely seems that there is an issue with Apple Mail -> Outlook 2010 (Exchange 2010) when sending attachments.

Just following up on this issue. We're seeing that folks using Outlook 2010 w/Exchange 2007 are all experiencing the attachment issue with Apple Mail messages. The attachment is appearing in-line and not as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814111 that has Outlook moving anything ln-line to appear as a normal attachment. 

Under this senario Outlook 2010 will, perhaps incorrectly, render jpg/gif/png attachments in-line at which point the user can right-click and Save As...  But other attachments like pdf/doc/etc... that can't be rendered in-line then don't appear and can't be accessed for download.

Folks using Outlook 2010 with Exchange 2010 are receiving the Apple Mail attachments correctly.

In this senario OWA 2007, like Outlook, seems to be rendering the jpg/gif/png attachments in-line but OWA then correctly shows other attachments for pdf/doc/etc... so for now we're using OWA as our workaround and are pressing to get all of our accounts migrated to Exchange 2010.

Our request for a fix for this support case was turned down for a fix for Office 2010 (even though they acknowledged the bug):

Unfortunately - I have bad news concerning this issue. The product team has reviewed the request, but the changes required to support this are too large for a regular fix. The team is looking at doing work in Outlook to support this in a future release, but it just cannot be done in the currently released versions. So the request was turned down for a change in the current product.

and

Yes - it is a really big change that is just too big to put in the current product.
So it will not be fixed in Outlook 2007 or in Outlook 2010 - or in future service packs for those products.
It is being looked into for the next wave of Office/Outlook.
 
Now - if it is fixed in the future in the next wave of Outlook - it might be possible that the functionality could be backported to Outlook 2010 - but the changes will be extensive and so might not be easily backported.

So, all our Outlook clients who will be using Google e-mail in the next 6 months will start not receiving e-mail attachments forwarded to them by Mac Mail.app clients.

And, if we're lucky, we'll see a fix in 2 years.   Bleah.  You might open an SR so they realize how big an impact this will have/is having.

• Proposed as answer by roonie1 Wednesday, May 27, 2015 4:02 PM

Hello Steve,

 

A request for escalation has been received on your support case 111050970814077, and we are in the process of identifying the best resource to assist at this time.  You will be contacted once one has been identified.

 

Once that support case is addressed, we will update this forum posting again with the resolution, or available workarounds.

 

Thank you,

 

Our request for a fix for this support case was turned down for a fix for Office 2010 (even though they acknowledged the bug):

Unfortunately - I have bad news concerning this issue. The product team has reviewed the request, but the changes required to support this are too large for a regular fix. The team is looking at doing work in Outlook to support this in a future release, but it just cannot be done in the currently released versions. So the request was turned down for a change in the current product.

and

Yes - it is a really big change that is just too big to put in the current product.
So it will not be fixed in Outlook 2007 or in Outlook 2010 - or in future service packs for those products.
It is being looked into for the next wave of Office/Outlook.
 
Now - if it is fixed in the future in the next wave of Outlook - it might be possible that the functionality could be backported to Outlook 2010 - but the changes will be extensive and so might not be easily backported.

So, all our Outlook clients who will be using Google e-mail in the next 6 months will start not receiving e-mail attachments forwarded to them by Mac Mail.app clients.

And, if we're lucky, we'll see a fix in 2 years.   Bleah.  You might open an SR so they realize how big an impact this will have/is having.

I was able to resolve this issue with the following fix on the MAC side. From terminal, I entered:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

Interesting -- that did work.   The text after the in-line attachment does show at that point.

However, asking "Grandma" to go run a Terminal command on her Mac at home to fix this -- is not really an optimal solution.

Also, FWIW -- I tried sending mail using Mac OS X 10.7's version of "Mail.app".    This has the same problem as the original post -- any text after the in-line attachment is shunted into a separate attachment.

RU4 does not address my original issue -- which is a problem with Outlook *not* using Exchange.  (RU4 apparently fixes the Exchange "missing attachment" problem, though...)

That bug still exists and apparently won't be addressed until the *next version* of Outlook.

RU4 does not address my original issue -- which is a problem with Outlook *not* using Exchange.  (RU4 apparently fixes the Exchange "missing attachment" problem, though...)

 

That bug still exists and apparently won't be addressed until the *next version* of Outlook.

Hi Steve, i experienced this for a long time and hoped microsoft would solve the problem but after a lot of research i concluded the problem is not outlook but rather mail.app...needless to say, apple will not change their ways so maybe you use workaround below?

Mail.app always tries to send as plain text even though the compose option is set to rich text. the MIME header category-disposition is set correctly as 'inline' but parameter 'attachment=filename' is included. As a result, the MUA treats the image as one that needs user action thus the attachment.

A work around for Mail.app is to force it to actually send the mail as rich text in which case the inline attachment is rendered correctly. To do this, some text in the mail should be formatted. For example, a simple bold '.'(dot) say in the signature can do the trick. Exchange will then recognize this as a multipart message and viola! the inline attachment is rendered correctly.

Hi Steve, i experienced this for a long time and hoped microsoft would solve the problem but after a lot of research i concluded the problem is not outlook but rather mail.app...needless to say, apple will not change their ways so maybe you use workaround below?

Mail.app always tries to send as plain text even though the compose option is set to rich text. the MIME header category-disposition is set correctly as 'inline' but parameter 'attachment=filename' is included. As a result, the MUA treats the image as one that needs user action thus the attachment.

A work around for Mail.app is to force it to actually send the mail as rich text in which case the inline attachment is rendered correctly. To do this, some text in the mail should be formatted. For example, a simple bold '.'(dot) say in the signature can do the trick. Exchange will then recognize this as a multipart message and viola! the inline attachment is rendered correctly.

I'm not seeing this as a workaround.

If I have Outlook set up as an IMAP client only to my Gmail account.

And I send a message from Mail.app on the mac to the Gmail account so it looks like this:

Some text

<excel attachment>

More text like:  • BOLD TEXT  ITALIC  LARGER FONT

signature

Outlook 2010 is receiving this as:

Some text

Excel attachment

"Untiltled attachment 00338.htm" containing everything else.  (note the change from .txt to .htm -- so it recognizes the rich text in the text following the attachment

So your workaround is not working for me, unfortunately

This is very bad from a security standpoint.

On one hand we're recommending users NOT open attachments.

On the other hand users MUST open attachments in order to completely read messages.

This opens the door for social engineering and remote-code execution.

So, for those still reading this thread...

From what I can see, this bug is *not* fixed in the Outlook 2013 preview release.   Any text that follows an in-line attachment is still being shunted (by Outlook) to an "untitled attachment".

I'm disappointed to say the least...

I'll post a note here about an issue which I  believe is related, in the hope that it will get addressed in an update of O2013. If you send an RTF email to someone who doesn't use Outlook, it will probably render in their client as a winmail.dat. So if you get a screenshot and paste it into your outbound RTF email, someone with Gmail won't see it. But if you paste and send via HTML, they will probably see it, depending on how Microsoft-specific the HTML and styling is.

1) It would be nice if Outlook was intelligent enough to recognize if you're sending a response to an email, where the recipient is not using a client that is likely to see images in an RTF response. Just check headers against a table, no?

2) One solution would be to update an Outlook Contact to send a specific format. While this feature exists, we unfortunately cannot set that to HTML. It must be "allow Outlook to decide", Text, or RTF. Sorry, but that's pretty dumb because it intentionally excludes everyone who doesn't use a Microsoft client, and while that's a cute attempt at brand lock-in, it's more likely the exact kind of thing that causes people to migrate away from Outlook.

In summary, we need Outlook to be able to send standard HTML so that we can communicate with anyone in the world who has a modern client, and we need to be able to set specific users as requiring HTML versus RTF. How tough is that for Microsoft developers to understand? Contact Internet Format settings should include both "Outlook HTML" format and "W3C-compliant HTML" ... if we can only send email that can be opened in IE then the whole exercise is invalidated.

Thanks for your time.

So for those still following this thread:   This bug was *not fixed* in the RTM version of Office 2013.

Which is disappointing considering how long ago we filed this issue.

I think there are a lot of people, who is looking for an answer in this topic, but forced registration stops them from participating..

So Outlook is still no fixed? Crappy bullshit, when does MS supposed to die at last? The world would be so beautiful without this company.

I think this is a simple problem to fix.  Try the following:

In Outlook:

File -> Options -> Mail

In the Message Format Section, uncheck "Reduce message size by removing format information not necessary to display the message"

Click OK.

New messages will not be "corrupted" when forwarded from MAC's (Outlook 2011).  It appears that something MAC Outlook does to the formating is not concidered necessary to PC Outlook. 

I guess even Microsoft has those two MAC and PC guys working across the hall from each other.

This might work -- if you were using Outlook on the Mac.   We are not -- we are using Mail.app on the Mac.

If you can figure out a simple solution to that -- we'll try it.

But Microsoft already confirmed they know this is a bug and that they decided not to fix this in Outlook 2013...

Hi everyone. I have some good news and some bad news :)

Good news is that i found a way to fix this! Bad news is that it has to be done by the Mac user and it requires installing software (actually a Mail plug in) that costs $15. The plug in software is called Attachment Tamer -

http://lokiware.info/Attachment-Tamer

The software can be used for free but it bugs you with a pop up reminder every time you star Mail. But at least people can test to make sure it works (or even use for free if the pop up doesn't bother them).

But I think $15 is a small price to pay to make sure mail you are sending is coming through correctly to all users.

MS could fix this quite easily, and so could Apple. But since it is Outlook users that are effected, it is MS that should  fix it in my opinion.

• Edited by Parabolee Friday, April 26, 2013 4:33 PM

Hi everyone. I have some good news and some bad news :)

Good news is that i found a way to fix this! Bad news is that it has to be done by the Mac user and it requires installing software (actually a Mail plug in) that costs $15. The plug in software is called Attachment Tamer -

http://lokiware.info/Attachment-Tamer

The software can be used for free but it bugs you with a pop up reminder every time you star Mail. But at least people can test to make sure it works (or even use for free if the pop up doesn't bother them).

But I think $15 is a small price to pay to make sure mail you are sending is coming through correctly to all users.

MS could fix this quite easily, and so could Apple. But since it is Outlook users that are effected, it is MS that should  fix it in my opinion.

• Edited by Parabolee Friday, April 26, 2013 4:33 PM

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814111

WORKAROUND
To work around this issue, open the separate file attachments in Outlook to view their contents.

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

It looks like this has been a bug since Outlook 2000, and Microsoft still refuses to change the way their client read the body of an email attachment.

For Steves sake! Fix it!

I am just now noticing this issue using Exchange 2012 and Apple Mail client v8.2 (i.e., Yosemite). 

Not handling multi-part mime correctly and taking the rest of the text/plain message as an attachment (ATT0001.txt). 

Very stupid. Fix the issue dudes! This has been going on for 4 years!

Hah -- had forgotten about this case.   Last time I asked about it was in 2012 when Outlook 2013 went GM (I'm assuming this is what you tested against?)

I should swing back to my case and find out if this is finally planned to be fixed in "Outlook 2016" (or whatever they will brand it as...)

Agree this is even more evident and disruptive when the original email sent was of the form...

Text

<attachement>

Text

<attachement>

Text

<attachement>

Text

<attachement>

Text.

As everything after the first attachment is treated as an attachment. So the email looks like it's been sent mid stream.

Doesn't look like any attention has been paid to this as it's still an issue in Outlook 2011 / 2015 preview on the Mac as well.

Cheers,

Gary.

• Edited by NTSV Technology 2 hours 40 minutes ago

Agree this is even more evident and disruptive when the original email sent was of the form...

Text

<attachement>

Text

<attachement>

Text

<attachement>

Text

<attachement>

Text.

As everything after the first attachment is treated as an attachment. So the email looks like it's been sent mid stream.

Doesn't look like any attention has been paid to this as it's still an issue in Outlook 2011 / 2015 preview on the Mac as well.

Cheers,

Gary.

• Edited by NTSV Technology Friday, June 05, 2015 4:50 AM