Extra, unexpected attachments

B

Bruce Truax

I had a very disturbing event happen when sending an email with attachments
yesterday. I was preparing email messages to two competitors, sending
proprietary information to each. I double and triple checked each message
to make sure that the correct attachments were being sent to each customer.
Later in the day I received a call from one of the people in my company who
was cc'd on the email and he told me that I had sent company A material to
company B. I double checked the company B email and there were only the 7
attachments which I had intended to send to company B attached. My coworker
then sent the email he received and sure enough there were an additional 5
attachments. 4 of which were from company A and the fifth was a company B
attachment which I thought I forgot to send.

I then went to the message in the Sent Mail box and saved the message to
disk as a .eml file and reopend it. Sure enough, there were the extra
attachments. I know that I never attached these files to this particular
message. The message did sit in my Drafts folder for some time as I was
working on it but I do not see how that would cause extra attachments to
show up. What is most disturbing is that these extra attachments did not
show up in the attachments list so there was no way for me to know what what
happening until I received notification from a recipient.

I should also mention that I started this email as an html message and then
reverted to plain text before sending.

There is a fortunate ending. We were able to contact the company B
recipient (in Japan) and tell him that the email was corrupted and had
errors and to please delete the message without opening. He did and I later
recomposed and resent the message, this time through an intermediary who
could check the attachments first.

This is such a serious flaw in Entourage that I may need to drop it for
Apple's Mail program. If the proprietary attachments had been opened by the
wrong party it could have resulted in millions of dollars on lost sales, my
termination, as well as a possible suit by company A for improper handling
of their proprietary information.

Bruce
 
B

Barry Wainwright

I had a very disturbing event happen when sending an email with attachments
yesterday. I was preparing email messages to two competitors, sending
proprietary information to each. I double and triple checked each message
to make sure that the correct attachments were being sent to each customer.
Later in the day I received a call from one of the people in my company who
was cc'd on the email and he told me that I had sent company A material to
company B. I double checked the company B email and there were only the 7
attachments which I had intended to send to company B attached. My coworker
then sent the email he received and sure enough there were an additional 5
attachments. 4 of which were from company A and the fifth was a company B
attachment which I thought I forgot to send.

I then went to the message in the Sent Mail box and saved the message to
disk as a .eml file and reopend it. Sure enough, there were the extra
attachments. I know that I never attached these files to this particular
message. The message did sit in my Drafts folder for some time as I was
working on it but I do not see how that would cause extra attachments to
show up. What is most disturbing is that these extra attachments did not
show up in the attachments list so there was no way for me to know what what
happening until I received notification from a recipient.

I should also mention that I started this email as an html message and then
reverted to plain text before sending.

There is a fortunate ending. We were able to contact the company B
recipient (in Japan) and tell him that the email was corrupted and had
errors and to please delete the message without opening. He did and I later
recomposed and resent the message, this time through an intermediary who
could check the attachments first.

This is such a serious flaw in Entourage that I may need to drop it for
Apple's Mail program. If the proprietary attachments had been opened by the
wrong party it could have resulted in millions of dollars on lost sales, my
termination, as well as a possible suit by company A for improper handling
of their proprietary information.

Bruce
Click to expand...


I have not come across anything like that before. It is likely an indication
of corruption in the database - try rebuilding the database by holding down
the option key when starting Entourage until the rebuild screen appears.
Then, follow the instructions.
 
B

Bruce Truax

I actually did this between the time that I started writing the email and
the time the email was sent because of some sluggishness in the response of
the program. What is so disconcerting is the fact that there was no way to
see that there were extra attachments prior to sending the message. Even if
the database is corrupted attachments should never be invisible.

Bruce
 
M

mmmmark

If you expand the center part of the mail window, perhaps you can see all
the attachments.
 
B

Bruce Truax

I tried expanding and scrolling, the extra attachments are not visible. The
only way to tell they are present is to look at the email source.

Bruce
 
B

Barry Wainwright

Can you send me one of these mails as an attachment - drag the problem mail
to the desktop where it will produce a .eml file, zipit and send it to me
off-list.

I will investigate further.
 
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