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Attachment arrives corrupted / won't open after being emailed

Any Office file · what this error means and every free fix to try first

Attachment arrives corrupted / won't open after being emailed

What's actually wrong

Email systems sometimes mangle attachments: encoding gets broken in transit, or the file is actually an HTML/RTF body masquerading as a document. Very often the file isn't damaged at all — it's mislabeled.

Free fixes — try these first

  1. Ask the sender to re-send inside a .zip — zipping protects the file from encoding damage.
  2. Download from the email's web interface instead of a desktop client (or vice versa) — one path often works when the other corrupts.
  3. Rename a copy to .rtf or .html and try opening — mislabeled files open immediately.

If the free fixes fail

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