Troubleshooting Sending Attachments in Internet Mail and News

This article describes steps to help you troubleshoot the following problems in Internet Mail and News:

• A message containing an attachment is not sent.
• Messages containing attachments seem to be sent correctly, but are never received.
• A message is received, but cannot be viewed.

To troubleshoot sending attachments in Internet Mail, you must determine if the problem lies on the sending computer or the receiving computer. Use one of the following sections to determine the origin of the problem.

Attachment Is Not Sent

To troubleshoot problems on the sending computer, first check to be sure there is sufficient disk space. If the hard disk is low on free space, you may not be able to spool the attachment to your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Free some disk space on your computer. Two ways of doing this are:

• If you save copies of sent messages, you may be able to delete some of these to free space. The files with attachments most likely consume the most disk space.
• Delete the deleted messages from your Deleted Items folder within Internet Mail.

Attachments Seem to Be Sent Correctly But Are Never Received

Check to see if the attachments you are sending are larger than your ISP allows.

Your ISP may restrict the size of attachments you are allowed to send. If this is the case, you should either send smaller attachments or have Internet Mail "break apart" messages that are over your ISP's limit. To do this, follow these steps:

1. On the Mail menu, click Options.
2. Click the Send tab, and then click the "Break apart messages larger than <nn> KB" check box to select it.
3. Adjust the value to the size of the largest attachment you want to send. The default value is 60 kilobytes (KB).

A Message Is Received But Cannot Be Viewed

Internet Mail downloads and combines multiple-part messages automatically upon receipt. Other Internet mail packages may respond differently. For more information about problems receiving multiple-part messages, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Internet Mail also allows for two different types of encoding algorithms for text: UNIX-to-UNIX Encode (UUENCODE) and Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). These are the two most common methods of encoding used on the Internet. MIME is always used when encoding the attachments for an Internet Mail 1.0 mail message. Other mail clients may not have the capability to decode MIME encoded messages. To determine if the receiving mail client has the ability to use these encoding methods, check the product's documentation.