Mail.app corrupting attachments

I also had this problem. In my case the frequency of occurances reduced significantly once I disabled all of the rules defined in Preferences->Rules.

Hi All,

I have the same problem using OS X 10.8.3 (Mountain Lion). A fair no. of pdf attachments from my work and personal e-mail accounts (IMAP, google mail) are corrupted and cannot be opened. However, I can normally open them if downloaded from the Web-Server.

Any ideas why this could be happening? Any proposed solutions?

Cheers,

Fernando

Fernando:

This is a bug in Apple Mail. There really is no solution to it until Apple decides to fix it. There has been no update to Apple Mail in the past several years. I have switched to Postbox and no longer have this problem.

Roger

Thanks for your prompt reply Roger. I will explore the posibility of migrating my current e-mail accounts to an alternative client. I recall I used Thunderbird in the past, you mentioned you are using Postbox, any reason why you have chosen Postbox over other clients?

I have a few archived/innactive non-gmail accounts, in case the attachments are corrupted I would have lost those documents forever. Is this correct?

Cheers,

Fernando

Fernando:

I am not a computer professional. I did the research on email clients more than a year ago. I cannot recall the specific reasons that I chose Postbox so you will need to look into it on your own. In my experience the attachments were not corrupted on the gmail servers, the corruption took place within Apple Mail. I could view the attachments within online gmail and there was no problem. I do not know how you archived your accounts. It is possible you will be able to access the files from Postbox or another non-Apple email client.

My interest in this thread and speed of response is due to the fact that I continue to be amazed and baffled that Apple has not fixed what I consider to be a major and critical flaw in one of their central applications.

Good luck,

Roger

Hi Roger,

Thanks again for your thorough explanation. I understand, I was just asking. I did some research and Postbox is an excellent choice. It seems that Postbox is based on Thunderbird, which apperantly is not going or is currently no longer supported.

As I previously said, I experienced exactly the same issue as you do/did, file corruption happens within the Apple Mail environment.

I share your interest in this thread and I am also amazed that the company has not been able to solve this critical flaw in an application used in professional environments, where file integrity is crucial.

Cheers,

Fernando

Hi guys,

just wanted to confirm this problem in Mountain Lion 10.8.3. In my case attachments in Apple Mail are corrupted when moving e-mails from one folder (for example inbox) to another folder (local or server) in Mail. It happens with jpgs, pngs and pdfs. The attachments are fine when opened on the mail server via webmail in the browser. So I guess it must be a problem within Mail. I can't see any "rule" when this happens. It does not depend on the sender, operating system of the sender, attachment size etc. One out of 11 Macs has this problem on the same network. The smtp-server is managed by a large webhosting company and not locally.

Rebuilding the affected folder in Mail helps to fix the problem temporarly. Any ideas how to fix this for good?

Same problem here. It is driving me insane.

I'm have the same issues. One of my clients is having a hard time with this as she likes to keep her inbox nice and tidy. I hope this bug gets fixed or I will have to move to outlook. 😟

Hi,

I have had the same issue with Mail in Lion (message contains gibberish after moving to a new Mailbox) and found that if I select the message that has all the gibberish and select "Message" from the titlebar and then "Move to <Mailbox Name> Again" or Alt-CMD-T the message appears correctly.

Obviously if you have moved other messages since the folder listed in the command above may not be the same as where the message currently is, so you should check and possibly use the "Move To" command and select the same Mailbox (although I have not needed to try this way).

Hope this helps.

Mac OS 10.8.4

Mail 6.5

UK

Love the phrase, "...she likes to keep her inbox nice and tidy"!

But to matters more pressing... I have a very similar problem, and hopefully I can add another piece to the puzzle.

About 6 weeks ago, I started to get recipients contact me to say the attachements I sent were opening, but empty. These attachements were a combination of word, excel, jpegs and pdf's. When I checked the attachements were there and looked fine.

I've therefore started to check the attachments once I had attached them to each email BEFORE I sent them, i.e. the draft version. When I did, I received the following message:

The application mentioned just changes depending on what application is applicable. So if I have a Word doc as well, I would get the same message, but with Word being named as the application. Both are supported file types, so this indicates the files are being corrupted... I believe Mail is causing the problem, and here's why.

I was rebooting and rebuilding permissions to get to a stage where this pre-sending test (of file already attached to email) would result in the attachments opening fine... and when they do, the attachements are then sent and received without any issue.

But I can achieve the same result if I just quit Mail and restart... but if I do that, I have to remove any attachments from the draft email as they are still courrupted. But if I then attach the original master files, and then do the pre-test send, so far they always open up fine and are sent and received okay.

So Mail is definitely corrupting these attachments.

So once I do that it's fine for a period of time, but then for no descernible reason, suddenly I get the error message pop up saying the files are corrupt (often within the same day).

I changed my attachment set up from standard (where I think apple embeds the attachments and you can see the image on the outgoing email) to a basic attachment type, i.e. it's just an icon of the file. That was to overcome PC users saying they could always download my standard 'embedded' apple mail attachments.

So I may try and reset that to see if that is causing any issues on this.

My ISP is VirginMedia, so is a major provider and I'm not hearing this problem from that community.

It's something to do with Apple Mail, but maybe a configuration thing?

Incoming mail attachments no problem.

Just to be clear, I just quit and restart the Mail application to temporarily stop my outgoing attachments being corrupted. i.e. I DO NOT restart the Mac.

My wife is also having this same problem on her MacBook, running Mountain Lion and using Mail as her email client. Any email she sends that has an attachment arrives corrupted. Whenever the receiver of an attachment she sends from her macbook clicks on the attachement, they get a dialog box that says "The file “name of file” could not be opened because it is empty." This happens no matter what file type is sent (.doc, .pdf, .jpg, etc...). I've tried numerous tests with different types of documents, with teaxt in the mesage and with no text in the message. Each time an attachment is sent to someone, it can't be opened and you get the dialog box that says the file is empty. Very troubling. Does anyone have a workaround? Isn't Apple listening? Seems like way too many people are having this problem.

as I-Pole posted above, exactly,that's it: in Mountain Lion 10.8.3. But also Mountain Lion 10.8.3. Atacchments in Apple Mail are corrupted when moving e-mails from one folder (for example inbox) to another folder (local or server) in Mail. It happens with jpgs, pngs and pdfs. The attachments are fine when opened on the mail server via webmail in the browser.

It is clearly a Mac Mail bug, and I hope by posting as many reports as possible Apple will do something, as I do not want to change application for this.

The only workaround for me is to restart Mail.