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Lion Mail PDF attachments occasionally corrupting

Since upgrading to Lion I've noticed that some PDF attachments won't open in Preview - I get the following:


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The file “1234.pdf” could not be opened.

It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize

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This continues to happen even after I drag the attachment to the desktop or rebuild the IMAP inbox.


If I go to the webmail for the email provider, open the mail and download the attchment it is fine - so something in Lion (never had this before in Snow Leopard) seems to be corrupting it.


Anyone able to shed some light on that's going on here?


Thanks

Robert

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 13, 2011 9:20 AM

Reply
23 replies

Oct 18, 2011 12:06 PM in response to Robert Berkeley

So far I'm seeing this with PDFs. In one email, I had two versions of the same PDF: one was the original, and the other had been highlighted and anotated (probably in Preview). The original opens, and the other gives me problems.


I've used the highlighting feature heavily in Preview, but I've found that it occasionally corrupts the PDF, such that if you copy and paste text (not necessarily the highlighted text), it come out all garbled. I'm wondering if Lion does a better job identifying damaged PDF files (damaged by previous OS versions, perhaps). Haven't been able to look into this very much, but I'm eager to find out what the problem is.

Nov 20, 2011 5:20 AM in response to bryanfromcupar

Well what's weird is that I was finally able to open the latest newsletter! Happy about that but it didn't clear up the problem with the older ones as I still wasn't able to open them when I tried again. Just hoping I'll be able to open future ones when they're sent to me. I do still have strange problems though, like not being able to upgrade my Firefox browser. It'll say connecting to server and won't go any further than that so I'm stuck at 3.0. when the latest Firefox is now 8.0 Someone told me I'd have to start over and restart my MacMini with the start-up disk but I'm hesitating because I'm afraid I'll do something wrong and mess things up. Good luck to you.

Nov 23, 2011 1:52 AM in response to Robert Berkeley

Excuse me for my bad english.

I'm using Lion and i have the same problem with multi PDF attachment created by anteprima or color sync (with reducing size filter).

The problems appear in Old multi PDF (created by snow Leopard), in new multi PDF (created by lion) and in some image.png created by snap shot.

Apple please solve this bad problem, because it creates many work disguide.

Osx Lion, mail with imap gmail.


Tank you.

Dec 4, 2011 9:31 PM in response to Robert Berkeley

Same problem here and nothing makes sense. Tonight a PDF would open on iPhone, but not iPad. Says incorrect file format. Have had similar issues with both iPhone and PC


PDF files are not locked and if I go directly to the mail server - the files are just fine.


I am guessing there is a bug, but no one at apple seems to be helpful...


All my devices are up to date, etc. any ideas folks?

Lion Mail PDF attachments occasionally corrupting

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