Apple's OS X Mail forward to Outlook Office = attachments

Author: Bart de Vreede
Last update: 03-05-2013

 

Just solved one of those strange things.

At my work we have a mixed Windows XP, OS X Leopard and one system with OS X Snow Leopard. On the XP systems we use Outlook Office 2007 and on the Mac's OS X Mail.

When my employer sends or forwards a mail from the OS X Snow Leopard system to one of the systems using Outlook Office 2007 all of the text is added as several different attachments and some blank or empty ones. None of the Leopard systems has this problem.

When you send the same email to from OS X Snow Leopard to Outlook (not the Office version, but the standard edition) or from OS X Leopard there seems to be no problem. Strange huh?!

It took me several days to find out what the problem was, but the good news is that I did find the problem.

It's not OS X Leopard, OS X Snow Leopard, Apple Mail, Windows or even Outlook (Office). No, the problem was IMAP!

When you send an email from Apple Mail connection through IMAP to a Windows machine using Outlook Office 2003 or 2007 all of your forwarded text is converted into several little attachments. You will have to open all of them to see what is in it and yes, that is a pain in the ...

The solution

In my case the solution is to let Windows receive your mail using the POP3 protocol and send your mail from OSX using the SMTP protocol. After that, everything should be fine.

If this worked for you please Like or Tweet. Thank you!

 

 

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Article tags: Apple, Mail, OSX, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Windows XP, OSX Leopard, empty attachments, forward, IMAP, POP3, SMTP

 

 

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