Client’s can’t open “noname” attachments in Gmail but in Outlook they open fine

Dynamic integrates with Microsoft Outlook.  Dynamic sends invoices and statements to clients’ by email.  This is a great time saving feature but sometimes problems occur.

One such problem is the display of the attached PDF in Gmail.

What is this?

This not a Dynamic issue.  The issue is experienced by Gmail users who received PDF invoices sent by Dynamic.

The problem is with Gmail.

Any PDF sent as an attachment will be treated in this way by Gmail.

Who gets this?

The problem described here is typical for Gmail users and the same email, with attachment, forwarded to an Outlook user will not report the same problem.

Why is this important?

Never open untrusted attachments.

Clients may complain that they do no receive invoices sent to them by email.

The attachment is normally named invoice_123456789.pdf – and in standard PDF format.

Gmail users may report that they do not see a PDF attachment.  The attachment may appear as a noname attachment.  Some users may see a Winmail.dat attachment, similar to the problem experienced by Thunderbird users.

The problem presents itself like this:

Solution

Click the download button.  The noname attachment will be downloaded to the local Download folder.  Right click and select Open with… Reader (or your preferred PDF Reader).  The correct attachment will display.

Never open untrusted attachments.

Additional information for this issue:

This link indicates that the problem is at least seven years old:

There is a bug in Google Mail that sometimes gives you “noname” attachments, bizarrely encoded (it’s called “appledouble”), when sent from a Mac. Google have been made aware of the problem in March 2007 and are… hum… “working on it”. Here you can upload those files and retrieve them decoded. If for some reason it doesn’t work, send me your noname file *zipped* and I’ll see what I can do to make the script better.

And here:

I have a problem with using gmail on multiple machines, because I use Outlook Express on one machine and when I download a message I can open up the attachments fine but when the attachments are labeled at noname and there is no file association with it, but on OE the file reads file, can you add support for those files i dont know what they are.

-Dynamic