Sometimes, when a user is using Outlook Express to receive an email that was sent from Outlook, the email attachment may seems missing from Outlook Express. If you check the size of the email, it is quite large for a plain text email and the attachment is actually there but you just can’t see it. This is a common problem with Outlook when it is set to compose email in Rich Text format.

Solution 1:

There are two ways to solve this issue. The easier way is to ask the sender to configure his/her Outlook so that emails are composed in either HTML or Plain Text format.

1. In Outlook, click on “Tools” > “Options”

2. Under “Mail Format” tab, change the message format to either Plain Text or HTML.

Solution 2:

The second option is to use other program to extract the attachment from the email.

1. In Outlook Express, drag the email to the desktop. You will have a .eml file.

2. Open the .eml file with Winzip and extract the “winmail.dat” file.

3. Open winmail.dat with fentun.exe and you should see the original attachments of the email. (You can Google on fentun.exe and you should be able to find a download link of the utility.)