I just typed and emailed a letter to a colleague. My airport connection wasn’t the fastest, but it did send. She just let me know she couldn’t open the document, which measures a whopping 2.31 MB, instead of about 35 KB.
The formatting doesn’t appear off. There are no fancy graphics. The document is saved in Word. Updated versions of Panda Scan, Stinger, and AVG pronounce the document clean.
Any ideas?
A couple of thoughts:
(a) Do you have any pdf software? Convert it to a pdf and send that as a short-term solution
(b) Have you done the ‘Open and Repair’ thing? If you click Open on the toolbar, then the Open button on the pop up window has a little drop down menu and you can choose Open and Repair.
If you just want to get it to her with major formatting intact, just save it as Rich Text Format (.rtf) Lots of programs can read it and it just contains the basic information to present text well. It should be tiny.
Do you use Microsoft email software and, if so, is it set to edit in Word by default? (I’m sure I’ve seen that option when rambling around in the bowels of the option dialogues in Bill’s software.) I wonder whether it might be set to save and send as a Word document attachment by default as well…
I can’t check this possibility right now as I am using Firefox and Thunderbird (a legacy of the bad old days when Outlook Express was a screen door for viruses–it’s a lot better now).
It sounds like you created the file and mailed it from your own laptop using an airport WiFi connection.
What is your email client? Is the version on your machine still 35K? Is the attachment as shown in the Sent folder of your email client 35K? Can you download the version out of your own sent folder and open that?
It is possible for Word files to get corrupted, though it’s unclear if that’s what happened here.
Perhaps the writer of the document was tracking the changes in the document and forgot to delete them upon completion?
MS Word documents don’t get infected by Trojans.
If up to date antivirus software scans are showing clean, it’s very unlikely that it’s a virus problem.
Can’t help you on what the problem actually is, though. Let us know when you find out.
I take it you’ve never heard of macro viruses then? They can drop trojans.