Aol.com email receiving problems

Life Technology
1

I sent an email to someone (whom I may call “N”) who has an aol.com account, and attached several MS WORD files, totalling about 140k.

N replied with this email message:
Hello, Richard: I’m afraid my system does not accept “zip” files, or perhaps it’s my inability to know how to retrieve them, but if you would resend your documents under a “doc.” file, I’m sure I’ll be able to receive it.

Can anyone give me some idea of what the problem is? The files I sent were indeed in .doc format.
Does aol.com have some restrictions on receipt of files or something??

2

If you zipped them up with winzip before you sent them, perhaps the recipient doesn’t have winzip to unzip them. Did the recipient get the mail but not the attachments ? If so some over zealous virus scanner may have removed them before he got them. In that case I don’t see what you can do easily because most of these nanny virus scanners hate zip and exe files. You could try sending them without zipping them, but it would be an enormous email perhaps. Then again if it is a virus scanner, it might take umbrage at being sent word files too. The problem would appear to be at the recipient’s end. Tell him to get a hotmail account and sent them there.

3

No, I didn’t zip them before emailing.

Actually, this morning I resent them as three separate email. That was –
each email only had one file attached.

4

Strange problem at N’s end. I have no idea about aol - are they in a newer version of Word than he is using ? If Word is not launching OK but not opening the file it could be that, or that the filename is in Chinese which his system can’t read, or he doesn’t have Asian fonts or a million other things. Ask him to post his problem here - if possible.

5

It sounds more likely that Hartzell’s e-mail service automatically zips multiple attachments to reduce the size of outgoing e-mails. Just guessing here.

6

The files which I sent were 100% in English, and the file names were in English as well.

7

Hartzel,

I have AOL & really find it’s e-mail limiting… but I’ve been using the same address for about 5 years & do like some aspects of it’s automatic downloading of e-mails to my computer – what they call Auto AOL (used to be Flash Session), although I think that a POP3 server would be better & far more flexible…

Usually I don’t have a problem receiving files, & often receive zipped files (usually picture files)… but lately I’ve received some attachments sent from people in Taiwan (using Chinese windows I think) that downloaded as strange names & didn’t open properly.

You can try sending me a couple of word files as a test.
Harold mraulston@aol.com