WD: Word Attachment Is Not Readable Upon Receipt Via E-mail

ID: Q179093

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Word for Windows, versions 2.0, 2.0a, 2.0a-CD, 2.0b, 2.0c, 6.0, 6.0a, 6.0c
• Microsoft Word for Windows 95, versions 7.0, 7.0a
• Microsoft Word for the Macintosh, versions 5.0, 5.1, 5.1a, 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.1a

SYMPTOMS

When you send a Microsoft Word document as an attachment through e-mail, upon receipt, you expect it to be able to be read; however, instead it contains large amounts of random, garbled text.

CAUSE

This problem may occur when there is a mismatch in encoding types between the sending e-mail client and the receiving e-mail client, such as Microsoft Outlook.

WORKAROUND

For information about how to recover the attached file from the encoded text, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q171436
   TITLE     : OL97: E-mail Contains Text Instead of Attachment

MORE INFORMATION

The Internet was not designed to carry binary files. It is only able to transfer messages made up of ASCII text characters. To resolve this problem and to allow various file types to be sent over the Internet, and to be exchanged between diverse operating systems, encoding methods have been developed.

The two major encoding methods are Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) and Uuencode. Files encoded with either of these methods generally have information in the text header to identify the type.

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q179323
   TITLE     : File Encoding and Decoding: Overview and List of Third-Party
               Vendors

Keywords          : kbinterop
Version           : MACINTOSH:5.0,5.1,5.1a,6.0,6.0.1,6.0.1a; WINDOWS:2.0,2.0a,2.0a-CD,2.0b,2.0c,6.0,6.0a,6.0c,7.0,7.0a
Platform          : MACINTOSH WINDOWS
Issue type        : kbinfo

Last Reviewed: February 11, 1999