Large number of attachments on forwarded emails

[Anonymous]

An HTML template I'm using results in up to 72 attachments when forwarded from some email clients. Most of the attachments are named empty.gif or ATT00001.txt, ATTT00002.txt and so on. These are not actual files in the email. The actual images included in the template also appear as attachments, but that's less surprising.

From what I've found so far this may be the result of how Outlook forwards HTML emails. Has anyone else ran into this? Why is the email generating so many attachments?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

This happens because Microsoft Exchange Server is reformatting messages sent through it.

The Exchange server insists that message text must always be first and attachments must always be last. As soon as the Exchange software sees one attachment in a message, it stops looking for text, and treats anything else in that message as an attachment. Any remaining text sections are converted into attachment sections, and given fake file names (like "ATT00001.htm").

There is no way to make the Exchange server stop turning text sections into attachment sections.