Inline attachments are not displayed in Outlook 2007 e-mail messages

You receive an e-mail message in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 account, and the message has an inline attachment. However, there is no paperclip icon to indicate that an attachment exists within the message, and you cannot download or view the inline attachment when you open the message.

In Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, the message does not have a paperclip icon to indicate that there an inline attachment in the message. However, when you open the message, you can download and view the attachment in Outlook Web Access.

This issue occurs when you view an e-mail message that contains malformed MIME content in Outlook 2007. This malformed MIME content causes the message to incorrectly reference the inline attachment. In this case, Outlook 2007 cannot display the inline attachment in the message. This behavior is by design because Outlook 2007 follows the RFC2387 "The MIME Multipart/Related Content-type" specification document for inline attachments in messages.

Typically, the malformed MIME content has the following issues:

• The declaration of the MIME definition for the inline attachment is at the end of the message, after the message body.
• The message body uses a reference to the inline attachment definition before the definition is declared.
• The e-mail message does not follow the RFC2387 "The MIME Multipart/Related Content-type" recommendations for how to handle and define inline attachments as described in the following document:
  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2387.txt

To work around this issue, you will have to view the e-mail message in Outlook Web Access to see the inline attachments.

Note Even when you use this workaround, there is no paperclip icon to indicate that an attachment exists within the message.