I’ll try to make this not confusing.
[ul][li]I received an email in Outlook that should have had two Excel files attached. [/li][li]I opened the email, and saw ‘File A’. There was no ‘File B’[/li][li]I emailed ‘Ann’, requesting File B.[/li][li]‘Ann’ emailed ‘Beth’, who sent her the file(s) ‘Beth’ said that she did send both files.[/li][li]I forwarded ‘Ann’'s original email back to her to prove that I only received File A.[/li][li]‘Ann’ is confused. On my forwarded email, she sees File A and File B.[/li][li]I take a screen shot of the email I forwarded to ‘Ann’. It clearly shows only File A attached. No File B.[/ul][/li]So: She sees that she sent two files. I see only one file, and forward the email back to her to prove it. She receives two files from me. I show her what I’m seeing – one file.
She saved the ‘missing’ file to her own computer, then sent that file to me (as opposed to the original forwarding of the email she received). I did receive the file then.
Why would she send two files, and I only receive one – but when I forward the email back to her, she receives two?
FWIW, the Excel file is a little weird. First, it’s set up to wrap and merge text. Second, there’s a company logo (probably a .gif – I don’t know) in the corner. And the file opens to the Picture Tools tab. Is there something about the file that won’t allow it to appear in my Outlook, even when it’s actually there?
Outlook will hide attachments it deems threatening, but you should see a message to that effect if something is hidden. The attachment is still there, but Outlook won’t show it.
When you say the Excel file is set up to wrap and merge text, is that with macros? That will potentially trigger security filters.
I have no idea why it would block a file when sent with another file but not when sent individually. That argues against this being the reason, but I figured I’d throw this out there.
I assume by ‘tiny’, you mean not very high? Next to the picture of the envelope and ‘Message’ in the short block between the address information and the body of the message, there’s a little Excel icon with the name of the file next to it. There are no scroll bars for this box, and no indication there is anything other than what I see.
Our IT guy said it might be some sort of spam filtering, and that he’ll look at it when he’s in the office tomorrow.
Only that the ‘Merge’ and ‘Wrap’ buttons had been pushed. Automatic Excel thing, rather than a macro.
Binary files (anything that’s not a plain text file, like Excel) are encoded into ASCII for transmission, then decoded by the mail client. I suppose there is a very small chance that there is a bug in Outlook that prevented it from decoding and recognizing the second attachment, although when that happens you sometimes get a bunch of random-looking characters in your email since the client thinks it’s ASCII data instead of an attachment.
It’s not spam filtering. That would remove the attachment, so you would not be able to forward it to anyone else.
Does she have the same version of Outlook that you do?
