Fix apparently-corrupted PDF attachments in Mail

Nov 10, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Lately I'd been having trouble with PDF attachments in Mail -- but only on my MacBook Pro. Instead of seeing a preview of the PDF in the message, I'd see a small black square, maybe 10x10 pixels in size. If I tried to avoid the problem by saving the PDF, the resulting file couldn't be opened in either Preview or Reader; I'd get an error message saying the PDF was corrupt. However, the very same message on my Mac Pro (using IMAP on both Macs, with the message in the inbox) worked perfectly, so I knew it wasn't a problem with the message itself.

After pulling my hair out for a while (no luck with Google searches, no Mail plug-ins on either machine, etc.), occasional macosxhints editor Kirk McElhearn suggested a solution that I hadn't even considered: rebuilding the mailbox on the MacBook Pro. Sure enough, after selecting Mailbox » Rebuild, all the troublesome PDF attachments were magically resolved -- previewing and saving both work as expected now. The odd thing about this is that, outside of messages with PDF attachments, that account was working perfectly on the MacBook Pro.

Because I came up empty when I googled for this issue before, I thought I'd post it here in case someone else is having the same problem.

Comments (9)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20081107082805685