msg attachments do not open

[chriscorcoran]

Hi

we are having issues when people email in with msg (email) attachments, we get the error shown, is this a bug?

 

Thanks

Chris

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Chris,

We are investigating this with our development team.  We are looking to see if there is an issue with how we decode this type of attachment.

James

[Victor]

Not necessarily Hornbill specific:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/officeversion_other-outlook/cannot-open-saved-msg-file/095ff296-5fd1-44fa-955c-61e4f4197430

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/648cb96f-f99b-423f-9cbf-3c4923d8b5b7/outlook-lock-on-msg-files?forum=exchangesvrclientslegacy

[chriscorcoran]

I have done some more testing and it only seems to happen through the Hornbill app. I can open he message attachment from the original email outside of Hornbill. Seems to be any .msg files

[Martyn Houghton]

Chris/Victor/James

We too are having the same issue, after going live on Monday. Emails with .msg attachments where fine in Suportworks and not in Hornbill. Using the exact same mailbox connection protocol and connection details. 

As per Chris is update, this affect all .msg file attachments.

Cheers

Martyn

[m.vandun]

I'm having the same issue where .msg are unable to be opened. Any updates on this?

 

Kind regards,

Mark

[Gerry]

All,

As far as I am aware, the .msg files that are stored in Supportworks (and from migrations of data in Hornbill) are not compatible with MS Outlook.  What is happening is you are opening the file, Hornbill does not directly handle the .msg files so it downloads the file and Windows has .msg associated with MS Outlook so it errors.  There is nothing wrong with the flle, or with Outlook, its just the Hornbill .msg file is not compatible with Outlook, they only share the same file extension. 

So the obvious question is why do .msg files that are Hornbill-specific not open in Hornbill - and thats a good question, I will need to get a definitive answer before I try and respond to that. 

Gerry

[Gerry]

All,

Ok reading on one of our internal product Workspaces it would appear that Hornbill does not currently have the ability to read these .msg files and some investigation will be happening next week to establish what is involved in making this work - please watch this space and I will ensure we update next week.  

Gerry

[Gerry]

All,

As a further update, everything I said above does not apply if the .msg file originates from Outlook, in this case we have to understand why Outlook will not re-open that message, something thats also on our agenda to look at.  So will have more info next weel

Gerry

[m.vandun]

Hi Gerry,

Thanks for the update.

We have found a quick workaround for now. When changing the extension to .eml we are able to open the file.

Kind regards,

Mark

[fisky]

I have also had a ticket open with support about this, but have been redirected here. The previous poster is correct that renaming the file .eml allows the emails to be opened. This is because a .msg file is a binary file type used by Outlook to store the email along with extra MAPI information. Hornbill when saving email attachements into the call is saving them as plain txt files. .eml is the correct format for plain text files and this is why Outlook gets confused.

I think the fix should be fairly simple, in that when Hornbill saves the attachment, it saves it as a .eml file into the call.

[Gerry]

Hi,

Thanks for the information, we will look into this and find out why we are calling the files .msg - this is almost certainly a hang-over from Supportworks code base where we used the .msg file extension for internal message attachments. Having a quick scout around google it would seem that Outlook sees a .msg file as an OLE binary format file, while .eml it would see as an RFC822/MIME encoded text file. I will make sure we look at that and see what we can do. 

Thanks for pointing out the work-around

Gerry

[Gerry]

Hi,

Just to let you know, we found the offending code and have applied a fix so that attached mail messages that are RFC822/MIME encoded will now have a .eml file extension.  This will make it into beta in the next week or so and will be out in live 1-2 weeks after that. 

Thanks again to everyone for the input. 

Gerry 

[Martyn Houghton]

@Gerry

That's good news, as we have be asking to customers to re-send emails with .msg attachments to a non Hornbill email address in order to get to their content, so will save a lot of hassle when this is rolled out to live. 

Will this be a server build or Service Manager release?

Cheers

Martyn

[Gerry]

Hi Martyn,

The changes identified were in the service that handles mail, so a server release in old money.  We are right in the middle of some performance released work which has involved some changes that require longer test/validation cycles so our release rate has slowed to a poultry 3 week window at the moment (its usually 72 hours from dev to live), so you can expect to see this in the next 2-3 weeks max.  There *may* be other changes in the SM/other apps, this will be part of the verification process so if there are, these will get done also. 

FWIW, having investigated this problem it was as I suspected a hang-over from the Supportworks implementation, proof that Hornbill is actually just Supportworks evolved   (some people do wonder if its just a brand new thing)

Gerry

[Martyn Houghton]

@Gerry

Not sure which release this it came out in but new emails coming in are now indeed attached as .eml and can be accessed correctly now.

Cheers

Martyn