[OU] Attachments in email not showing

[Ledgem]

Greetings all, I've experienced a weird issue two or three times now and was wondering if anyone could give me a bit more information about it. I'm using Opera 9.23 on Mac OS X 10.4 and had the issue happen to me today, but I believe I've experienced it under Windows XP as well.

A person will send me an email with an attachment, but Opera does not let me see the attachment in any form - not embedded in the message, no "save attachment" button, and in the main mail view I don't see the attachment icon. The message includes the size of the file (and takes up the proper download time), so it isn't a matter of the attachment being dropped or the person forgetting to add it. If I opt to view all headers I can see a huge wall of gibberish text, which I presume is the attachment.

Infrequently, I've had the "huge wall of gibberish" happen on certain downloads from webpages, where Opera fails to see that it should pop up the "save as" window rather than try to render the file as a webpage. Given that, I was thinking that perhaps Opera isn't recognizing the attachment as an attachment. Unlike the web scenario, where you can do a forced save as, I couldn't find any way to do something similar with the email.

So the question is: is this something with my Opera, with Opera in general, or is it an error on the part of the sender's mail client?

Today's email was with a ~10 MB Microsoft Word document (generated from MS Word 2004 for Mac), sent either from Mac OS' Mail program, or from Opera (I converted that person recently but I think she's still adjusting). I've also received two other emails that should have either included a Word document or a PDF (most likely), probably sent from Outlook or a webmail client, but had the same issue. Just to be sure, I've sent myself a Word document to the email address in question and it came out fine, so I don't think that this is a lack of ability to see Word documents in general.

Thanks and I hope you're all having a good week,
David