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Question

Outlook attachments not being received

Sep 27, 2012 11:36PM PDT

A local landscaping company uses Outlook 2010 on their office machine running Windows 7. They use QuickBooks to manage their books. Recently, when they send emails to customers, the regular emails get through. However, if the email includes an attachment, the customer never receives it. This is happening across a lot of people but has only started recently. Any help would be appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: attachments
Sep 27, 2012 11:51PM PDT

- Are they being sent? That's easy to see in the Sent Items box.
- Are they in the mail? That's easy to see by having a look at the size.
- Are they in the source of the mail. That's easy to see in the source of the mail.
- How are they being sent? From the QuickBooks program or from Outlook?
- Outlook stand-alone or Outlook linked to an Exchange or other mail server?
- Does it still work on their test machine (if they have one)?
- What changed since it last worked? Does it work OK if you go back to before that time (system restore)? Make a clone of the disk before you try, so you can go back to the current situation easily if that needs to be done.

Kees

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Update: turns out not Outlook...
Sep 28, 2012 12:21AM PDT

...they actually have an msn.com email address and simply use IE to access msn.com and then on to their mail.

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So please restate the problem ...
Sep 28, 2012 12:43AM PDT

in all necessary detail. For example, it's totally unclear what the relation is between Quickbooks on the one side and the browser they use to access their webbased mail on the other side.

Kees

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Ok...
Sep 28, 2012 2:35AM PDT

...the files are either created in Quickbooks and saved to the desktop or created via a scanner and saved to the desktop. From there, they use IE to access their msn.com account to create a new email, attach one of those files, and send. They are not sent directly from Quickbooks.

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Re: mail problem
Sep 28, 2012 3:13AM PDT

So they use IE to make a mail with an attachment in a webmail program that they reach from msn.com. If I go there I see a "hotmail" icon on the top right, and if I click that I have to login with a "Microsoft account" in a page shown by login.live.com. I can't go further, because I don't have a hotmail.com, live.com, msn.com or whatever.com account managed by Microsoft that possibly is behind that screen.

That webmail account should have an inbox and a sent items box, or whatever it's called.

So now I can rephrase my questions:
- Is the mail actually sent? That's easy to see in the Sent Items box.
- Is the mail actually arriving in the inbox of the receiver. That's easy to see if you sent it to yourself.
- Is the attachment in the sent mail? In the received mail? That's easy to see by having a look at the size.
- Is the attachment shown as an attachment in the sent mail? In the received mail?
- Can you open the attachment in the the sent mail? In the received mail?

And some variations:
1. Use another browser (Firefox or Chrome)
2. Do it on another PC
3. Don't attach an attachment from the desktop, but from another folder.

If it goes wrong in a webbased mailprogram, it's rather safe to say that it's an issue with the site or the server. In that case: contact Microsoft, because it's their mail server and their website that loses the attachment. It could be something as simple as the account quota being reached.

At the moment I can't say anything is wrong with their PC.

The more from the questions above you can answer when they ask them, the better their support can be. So it's time to start experimenting if you want this solved.

Kees

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And ...
Sep 28, 2012 3:16AM PDT

why not work around the problem if it's urgent? Which I doubt, because you don't seem to take any actions.

Just open a free email account at yahoo or gmail, set the 'answer to' address to the existing msn.com address and start sending those mails.

Kees