E-mail systems stripping Excel attachments

I hope someone can help...

Through my company, I have been sending excel attachments via e-mail for some time with no problem. However, in the last couple of months the recipient has been complaining that there is no attachment, just the normal body of the e-mail and a load of nonsense after that.

They claim not to have changed any of their e-mail stuff for ages, and neither have we. We're using Office 2000 through an Exchange server, with Mimesweeper filtering software.

Any clues would be most gratefully recieved.

Is the "loads of nonsense" pages and pages long?

Sounds like there is something wrong with either how the Mime encoding is being done when sending the file or how it is being interpreted at the recieving end. Actually i guess this could happen somewhere on route by another server.... technically.

Try sending the same attachment to non work account to see what happens. Then send them an email from a non work account to see if they get it ok. I guess it is just a case of trial and error to see if you can figure out where this is happening.

Thanks.
The file was also sent to other people, some inside the organisation, some outside, and everyone else was able to read it.

This leads me to believe it's a problem with the company receiving the file, but they insist they haven't changed anything, and they're clients so i can't tell them they're wrong... Ho hum...

is it only Excell files this happens with? How about Zipping it first?

Still worth sending it from an external address to them to illustrate yourpoint though :)

HAdn't thought of zipping, actually.

I'll give it a try, thanks

What version of office are they running? Can't remember when but Office 2002 SR-1 had security enhancements that stopped quite a few attachments from being opened so if the client has recently installed a Service Pack for Office this may be the cause of the problem. Office 2003 also behaves like this out of the tin. If they are using Exchange as a backend then do a search for Outlook Security Settings, this is a way of controlling which attachments are blocked via Public Folders on an Exchange mail server.

I think they're running office 2003, so that sounds like what it is. Thanks for your help...