Home/ Questions/Q 749989
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T14:29:55+00:00

I’ve just implemented some code that emails a bunch of our clients with a

  • 0

I’ve just implemented some code that emails a bunch of our clients with a CSV file attachment.

Some (not many) have got back to us complaining that they don’t get an attachment at all – just the CSV text inside the body of the email. Most however are fine.

I suspect that it’s different mail clients that are treating the attachment differently but I don’t have enough info yet to be sure.

I’m using .NET’s MailMessage class with the Attachment.CreateAttachmentFromString() method. The MIME type I’m specifying for the attachment is text/csv.

Anyone have any idea what the heck is going on?

Ta muchly

David

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Another possibility is that the failing email clients do not recognize the MIME type ‘text/csv’ and thus are showing the content uninterpretted in-line — it may actually go through better as ‘text/plain’.

    Edit: I just sent a test message with a CSV attachment from Outlook to my Gmail, and used the menu option “Show original” to see the actual multi-part content, and this is what I see:

    Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="test.csv"
Content-Description: test.csv
Content-Disposition: attachment;
  filename="test.csv";
  size=44;
  creation-date="Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:13:20 GMT";
  modification-date="Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:13:43 GMT"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

    So it looks like ‘application/octet-stream’ will do the trick.

    • 0