Help Me Re: File Attachments

[kim_jones]

Hello friends

I am having an extremely annoying problem in that iam unable to open any file attachments in my emails. I have a live account with hotmail and everytime i click on my attachments to download, i press open when the box appears. This seems fine, then another box appears with the estimated time for the file to download, yet there are not details of how long the file will take to download. There is an icon of the files floating between the computer and an image of the world yet nothing happens.

I have left this for 15 minutes yet the file has still failed to download! I have unchecked windows defender in my internet options yet i am having the same problem!

It is driving me to distraction! I am currently using windows vista and any help would be greatly appreciated


many thanks

kim jones

[Jackson2]

Is this attachment downloading problem occuring only in Hotmail? Have you checked with your email accounts other than hotmail whether you can download the files or not?

I dont have an Hotmail account personally so dont have any such experiences with me. However I have account on all other email services and never faced such problems there. So this seems to me a problem with Hotmail itself.

[Yogesh]

Jackson's doubt is almost true as I researched on this and found that there is a bug in Hotmail's file attacment downloads. Its that Hotmail does not support many types of file attachments and disallows downloading of such attachments assuming certain file extentions in the attachment to be a malware or something like this.

There can be two solutions to avoid this, however neither of them are pretty:

1. Have the sender send the attachment again, with a different name, or as a compressed file. ".zip" files are fine. ".exe" files are not. So if your sender creates a .zip archive of the .exe file that he's trying to send you, that you can save, and then decompress back into it's original form and name.
   
   Heck, just renaming the file is enough. Have the sender rename the .exe file into a .txt file and send that as an attachment. You'll be able to download it, and then rename it back to a .exe.
   
   
2. Forward the attachment to a non-Hotmail account. Hotmail doesn't mention this approach, but sure enough, even though you can't open the unsupported attachments, you can forward them to a different account on a different service. If that service allows you to open the attachment, you've got it.

[Nikita.P]

I feel particularly many Vista users are facing the attachment downloading problem through Hotmail. As far as I have seen, most of these were Vista users. But its not the problem in Vista but some kinda problem with Hotmail's rules (as like Yogesh explained one).

For instance, have a look at this article - Hotmail Fails To Deliver Up To 81% Of All Attachment Emails