Can anyone help with email problems? Since Friday 8/2/08, emails containing JPEGS to my Outlook Express Tesco address containing images from certain senders (others are OK!) have been arriving without attachments. Instead, huge ASCII files are incorporated in the text of the email, which the computer then laboriously scans for hyperlinks! Others have received the same messages OK. The problem is not just associated with one computer. My Vista computer shows the same problem for the same senders and Tesco have denied there is a problem with their mail server! The problem does not seem to be associated with file size.

Can you try a different email client?

Keep in mind that all file attachments are sent as encoded ASCII anyway, and turning them into attachments is a two stage process: It's up to the sending computer's mail software to put the correct identifiers and encode the ASCII data correctly, and it's up to the receiving computer to correctly decode those headers and data.

One of those two things has gone wrong. Perhaps because of some setting.

I was going to say it was the sending computer's method of encoding and sending the file. But then you said others have been receiving the messages OK. Still, perhaps the sender changed the encoding method and the others who are receiving the messages OK are using a different piece of mail software than you are.

Let me clarify the symptoms:
- Only email attachments from one sender are coming up as ASCII for you.
- Those same troublesome emails are received fine by other people.
- Emails from other senders with file attachments are coming up fine for you.
Is that correct?

It would be helpful to know the names of the email client software being used in the case of the sender, you, and one of the receivers who gets the emails fine.

I've seen attachments from Outlook that arrived as ascii, with "winmail.dat" near the beginning. I'd have thought outlook express would handle that, though. There's a setting in the sender's outlook to change this encoding.

-jk

Please do!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-mail_clients

I used to run Eudora for private email and at work I had MS Outlook. Eudora was (and still is) free and pretty easy to use.
I used Outlook Express for NewsGroups for a while, but changed newsreaders and never looked back.