Garbled characters when opening attached emails

[umbletech]

On exchange 2003 SP2. Got a weird problem. The user is unable to view emails that are sent as attachments. He can not view them using OWA nor can he view them using the outlook client. If he opens and email attachment it eithers opens up with no text in it or opens with no readable characters.

I emailed the user 3 emails with attachments that were in emails, in html, rich text and plain text format. They were all received. This did not replicate the problem.

A colleague in his department forwarded them on and he could open them. Both the forwarder and the client are on outlook 2003.

I thought it might be an encoding issue. As yet I don't know if the sender uses a mac or not.

I found a ms article that looked promising

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/836555

but couldn't see anything relevant.

My next move was to try sending emails as attachments from Entourage on a mac. My first problem is replicating the issue.

Does anybody have any other suggestions? I have the headers from the offending message but I was reluctant to post them for fear of spam harvesting.

 

[umbletech]

spoke to the user. The attached emails won't display at home or at work. It also happens intermittently with internal and external users.

I'm wondering about mailbox corruption. Is there any way to run integrity checks against a single mailbox - I don't want to mess with the entire store database if possible. Our backups are scheduled so that the online DB maintenance has time to run so I doubt corruption of the entire store or storage group is likely.

The only other thought I had was maybe an intermittent network issue. Anyone seen a dodgey switch cause this?