Thursday, June 9, 2011

Attachments visible in OWA but not in Outlook

Today I had a user saying that our e-mail scanners had blocked an attachment sent to him. Upon closer look, I realised that this wasn’t the case and looking at the transport logs I saw that an e-mail with more than 1MB was delivered to the users!
So, with the user’s permission I look into his mailbox. By using OWA I was able to see, open and save both attachments, but when I looked in Outlook (2007 v12.0.6557.5001 with SP2) there just weren’t there! However, the e-mail size in Outlook was showing more than 1MB, so they had to be there...

Tried forwarding the e-mail from Outlook to myself, and nothing... Tried from OWA and I received them with no problems!

I found this post on Microsoft Support which says this sometimes happens with inline attachments in Exchange 2007 SP1 (which is what we are currently using – I know, don’t ask!...).

Basically, for Outlook 2007 the attachment is hidden and it is unavailable for download. In OWA, it is still hidden but you can download and view it.

If you are using Exchange Server 2010:
- Stop the Exchange Transport service;
- Locate the EdgeTransport.exe.config file (located in the following path: :\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin\);
- In the EdgeTransport.exe.config file, add the following entry between the /appSettings element and the /appSettings element: add key="TreatInlineDispositionAsAttachment" value="true" /
- Restart the Transport service.

(Please note I had to remove the < > tags because of the HTML here...)


With Exchange Server 2007, just install Service Pack 2 and run the following command:
Set-OrganizationConfig –ShowInlineAttachments $True


As soon as I am able to test this, I will post here the results.

Hope this helps!