Perhaps you haven't personally come across one yet, but there are one or two iPhones in the world. Yet despite their ubiquity, there are still people who don't have them, and who do email you attachments that iOS can't fathom. We don't mean the times when they send you a document made in an iOS application you don't happen to have. Often, you will need to get that app -- but if they send you an Excel file, for instance, and you haven't got that, then iOS 8 offers to open it in Numbers. Your iPhone works hard, but still there are attachments that stymie it.
In every case, your best option is to go back to the sender and say "what?", but you can't always do that. We've also found that people who previously sent us readable attachments suddenly only send us unreadable ones, because someone in their IT department has waved their sonic screwdriver and changed something. Good luck explaining to your sender that there's this thing, you don't know what it is, but it's technical and someone in IT changed it, can you please ask them to change it back?
If you have a Mac,then you also have the option of reading the attachment there. OS X Yosemite won't read everything, but it'll open much more than your iPhone or iPad will. So if it can wait until you're at your Mac, let it go.
One more thing before you pull your hair out over unreadable attachments: there may not be one. If iOS shows you a paperclip icon next to a message in your inbox list of emails, and you can't find an attachment, scroll down. There's a strong chance that the email has some naff graphic logo in the footer, and that's what is showing up as an attachment.
If the person sending you an email actually says there is an attachment but you can't see it, there is also a good chance they forgot. It's not always the case: some JPEG attachments can appear as invisible white-on-white images, but if there's no big white gap, no dreadfully ugly logo graphic and no unfamiliar icon in the body of the email, they plain forgot. Its pretty common.
Otherwise, take a look at these problems and try these solutions. They've been tested on the latest iOS 8, but in each case the principle has been the same for many versions.
Winmail.dat
If you're going to get this problem, this is the problem you're going to get the most. Whatever your sender tells you they attached, and whatever that attachment is actually called, it doesn't matter. You just get a file called winmail.dat, and neither your iOS device or your Mac has any clue what to do with it.
The reason is that they are emailing you from Outlook or some other system using Microsoft Exchange, and something has been set up or changed poorly.
When you can go back to your sender, try asking them to send it zipped or maybe via Dropbox. Dropbox will definitely work; zipped might be easier for them to try.
Most of the time you can't go back to them, if only because you need to work on this attachment right now and they've gone home. In that case, all you can do is get a utility app that can open it for you.
There are many, many such apps and they vary in quality and price, though none are awful and none are expensive. We've been using
Winmail.dat Viewer, which for free lets you see what the real attachments are called. For a $4 in-app purchase, it lets you open them.
It won't do much, it will just open them, and you can then send the attachments on to something else to do your work.
We go for this particular iOS app because the same firm has a
Mac one that we've used for years. The free version of that has proved all we need for the occasional times we get these attachments, but if you need more options, then you can buy an in-app upgrade to Premium for $10. Or one of the competitors.
OpenOffice Documents .odt
Previously on Microsoft Word ... that software was so common that everyone had it, everyone assumed they had to have it, everyone paid what was a lot of money to have it. One of the many things that have reduced Word from king of the hill to just another one of the troops is
OpenOffice. This is a free, open-source (but rough) equivalent to Microsoft Office and it includes a word processor that looks remarkably familiar if you know the Microsoft one.
Nicely, it will open and save in Microsoft Word's format, but not quite so nicely, that's not the native, usual, standard format. Unless you make a specific, positive choice to save the document in Word format, it saves it in its own happy way, and you -- or the sender bedeviling you -- never even notice. However, the recipients of that document notice very much.
Chiefly because it won't open or Quick Look on iOS, OpenOffice's native format might as well be winmail.dat. Again, the answer is an app: try the free
OOReader. It is free to have a peek inside the attachment but that's all. To open and use it, you need to buy the in-app upgrade to OOReader Pro for $3.
Mysterious invisible JPEGs
This is pretty rare, but it comes up -- and its solution is also one more thing you can try when the other answers don't cut it for you.
When you've been sent this invisible JPEG, it's actually displaying as a white image on a white background. Conceivably you're friends with a minimalist, but more likely there's something slow with your internet connection and it hasn't displayed the image properly. It might, given time, but occasionally iOS thinks it's done or it thinks it can't do any more.
Scroll until you see a massive gap in the email where iOS is trying to display the image. Press and hold on it to call up control center. Tap on the Quick Look icon, and the odds are that you'll see the actual image. Tap on that image to bring back up the controls, and there is a Share icon that, when you choose it, brings back up that control center. Now tap on Save Image, and the attachment will be in your Camera Roll.
If your mysterious attachment isn't an image, Quick Look may yet show you enough that you can read it. Otherwise, sorry, you've got to make like that Elvis Presley song and Return to Sender.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher
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