We have a few users receiving what appears to be an auto-generated e-mail each month with Billing information either in PDF or CSV format. As the Admin, I have a Notes 8 client and can see & open the attachment. Users with 7.x clients say they do not see or have the ability to open the attachment.
In the past, I had contacted IBM about a similar issue, and they reported that Microsoft does not fully, 100% comply with ANSI mail standards (sometimes creating their own standards). I blame part of the problem on the sending party and incompatabilities with Exchange and Notes, because no other users have reported problems receiving CSV or PDF attachments from other senders. Or, it’s possible that the attachment is not generated correctly and attached by their automated system.
Each month I get the grips from the few users who receive these reports. I have to open their mail file, detach the attachment, delete the attachment from the message, then reattach it.
Is anyone farmiliar with this? Does anyone know of a resolve? I’m considering installing the 7.0.3 client, and may consider installing the 8.x client as my 8.x client doesn’t have any problems.
Subject: Problem with received PDF and CSV attachments
One thing I just came across was an airline (I won’t tell any names) sending “eTickets” with a content type of “multipart/mixed”, where the one and only part of the message would contain a base64 encoded HTML file. (Btw: The bar code to be scanned at the self-service desk - that means the piece of info, that really makes up the ticket - was not really included in that mail, but there was a simple img tag refering to some servlet on their server, that happily generates bar codes for anybody who knows what reference ID to pass as an arguemnt. The four tickets I bought showed a fixed offset between each other … Furthermore the inline CSS was faulty, so the bar code didn’t even display right in anything but IE.)
O.K., taken this unrelated stuff aside, it could be that the messages your users receive are something similar, maybe a broken - or at least weired - multipart mime message and maybe containing the attachments in base64 encoded format or something similar. Take a look at the actual source of the message.
I’m not sure if this still works the same in Notes 8 as it did in 7, I suppose not. I suppose, that upgrading to 7.0.3 might not solve the issue, but just upgrading to 8. IBM changed the rendering engine for HTML mails in Notes 8 to Internet Explorer (while Microsoft of the other hand changed the rendering engine for the latest Outlook version from IE to Word …).
But I must admit, that I’m only guessing about the root cause of the problem.