The Exchange 2003 server in our Atlanta office is corrupting attachments for
outgoing mail to external recipients. The attachments are PDF, Excel and
Word files for the most part. The errors that the recipient gets varies
according to the file type. PDFs come through as "corrupt", Excel files
usually give an "access denied" error. Word documents will do the same, but
will also sometimes never open at all, and just sit there spinning forever
in the Save or Open dialog. The corruption appears to be random and doesn't
always occur, and sometimes a sender can re-send the same attachment and it
will go through fine on the second or third try. This only happens to
attachments sent outside of our organization to external recipients.
Internal recipients in our other offices get attachments from Atlanta with
no problem - with one exception. Our Chicago office gets winmail.dat files
in place of the regular attachments. I believe that winmail.dat is how
Outlook wraps up RTF messages, and only non-Outlook users should see this.
Our Chicago office is using Outlook exclusively, so they shouldn't see the
winmail.dat files at all. The Chicago server is the only one where this
happens, and this is the only server in our org that is still running
Exchange 2000. The rest are all running 2003.

I've tried blowing out and rebuilding the virtual directories in IIS on the
Atlanta box, thinking that the permissions got hosed up, but this didn't
help. We also thought that our Trend anti-virus for Exchange was causing the
corruption, but we actually turned this off for a few days and this had no
effect on the problem. I'm about to roll out a GPO for Outlook forcing HTML
format for all users in the Atlanta office, just to see if this is limited
to RTF formatted emails.

Any ideas?

Archived from group: microsoft>public>exchange2000>general