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Outlook 365 keeps corrupting PDF and Office files

Anonymous
2023-05-10T02:49:12+00:00

Since April we started a new EA agreement with Microsoft and added all of our users to E5 licenses of M365 on top of the E3 licenses they already had - we were told that the E3 licenses would disappear anyway.

We don't know if that is related, however since mid-April we started to have numerous users who find their email attachments to get corrupt in Outlook. Whether it's with Outlook 2016 or 365, and Windows 10 or 11 Pro, the symptoms are always the same: the size of the attachments decrease significantly and they cannot be opened in their usual application (Adobe PDF Viewer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

Attachments in emails are oftentimes received already corrupt and are therefore unusable, sometimes they are good to be viewed or opened, then later on get corrupt. Sometimes

the attachments get corrupt when their related emails get forwarded to other users (who also find corrupt attachments in the emails they received).

We noticed that Outlook sometimes get even in a state where no file can get attached to a new email, or no attachment from a received email can get saved on any drive.

Whenever a user tries to open a corrupt attachment, an error message similar to this appear: "there was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired". No useful details get logged in the Event Viewer, all we see at the time of the error is "An unexpected error has occurred".

We tried the SaRa diagnosis program on some users' workstations with no luck, the SaRa program gets to vanish before the issue is seen again.

We tried to run Desktop Outlook in Safe Mode, the issue has not been seen. We tried to disable all of our add-ins one by one in normal mode, the issue was seen with every add-in being disabled....

We have hundreds of users and are out of ideas. Can you please help.

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-06-16T19:36:36+00:00

    Our Office 365 version is 2303.

    We solved the issue here by deploying the following Known Issue Rollback (KIR) to over a thousand of workstations:

    Windows 11, version 21H2: KB5023774 230222_032017 Known Issue Rollback

    Windows 10, versions 21H2/22H2: KB5023773 230222_032013 Known Issue Rollback

    See: Windows 10, version 22H2 | Microsoft Learn

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  1. Anonymous
    2023-05-10T05:27:17+00:00

    Hi Stéphane,

    Thank you for posting on Microsoft Community!

    Per your description, seems it is an Outlook desktop client issue or it is related to PC configurations. Could you try to set user's PC component security settings back to the default settings:

    1. Click Start, type dcomcnfg in the Search box, and then click dcomcnfg in the Programs list.
    2. In the navigation pane, expand Component Services, expand Computers, right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
    4. Open the Default Properties tab, and then set the following values:

    If these above steps do not resolve your issue, could you provide more detailed information to us? (User's Outlook version, Office 365 admin center attachment settings). As this issue is happening on organization wide, you may also submit a support ticket to Microsoft Support team, they have more permissions and tools to help you remotely check. We will also reply and help you!

    To Open a support ticket:

    1. Go to the admin center with your Office 365 admin account at https://admin.microsoft.com
    2. On the bottom right side of the page, select Help & support.
    3. Type a question or keyword into the text box. If you get a drop-down list, select the one closest to your question, or continue typing your question, then press Enter.
    4. If the results don't help, at the bottom, select Contact Support.
    5. Enter a description of your issue, confirm your contact number and email address, select your preferred contact method, and then select Contact me. The expected wait time is indicated in the Contact support pane.

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/get-help-support?view=o365-worldwide 

    Thank you.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-05-10T16:09:18+00:00

    Thanks. Our workstations already have these settings.

    As I already said we have Outlook 2016 and 365 running on both Windows Pro 10 and 11.

    Please guide me to the "Office 365 admin center attachment settings" as I should have access.

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-05-10T16:10:53+00:00

    Also can I reply in private as I wish I could share private info.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-05-11T09:48:56+00:00

    Hi Stéphane,

    Thank you for replying us!

    To troubleshoot the attachment issue, you may follow steps in this Microsoft article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot-attachment-problems-in-outlook-2a2e7183-d66a-42d8-8c91-219d663dc842 

    To provide private information, we suggest you to submit a support ticket to Microsoft, then a support engineer will contact you via phone call or email to remotely help you with this issue.

    Here is the instruction to submit a ticket:

    1. Go to the admin center with your Office 365 admin account at https://admin.microsoft.com
    2. On the bottom right side of the page, select Help & support.
    3. Type a question or keyword into the text box. If you get a drop-down list, select the one closest to your question, or continue typing your question, then press Enter.
    4. If the results don't help, at the bottom, select Contact Support.
    5. Enter a description of your issue, confirm your contact number and email address, select your preferred contact method, and then select Contact me. The expected wait time is indicated in the Contact support pane.

    You may watch the video instruction below too: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RE1FOgo?autoplay=false&postJsllMsg=true 

    Feel free to reply us if you need further help!

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