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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments No comments
Answer accepted by question author
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

Was this answer helpful?

2 people found this answer helpful.
0 comments No comments

48 additional answers

Sort by: Most helpful
  1. Anonymous
    2023-06-15T14:11:02+00:00

    Samuel,

    I checked our support cases and so far, don't see any cases with corrupt attachments with Amazon SES. If you have an M365 tenant can you please open a support case so the support team can look into it further? Or, you can check if you have Outlook In App support (Help, Contact Support) for Outlook Desktop and submit a ticket that way.

    Are you sending or receiving attachments with Outlook? If you go to WebMail are the attachments working there? If you are sending attachments and they get to the recipient corrupt, are they corrupt in the Sent Items folder in Outlook?

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  2. Anonymous
    2023-06-15T00:26:08+00:00

    Hey Gabriel,

    I have since installed the 2023-06 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 22H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5027231) and can confirm that it has NOT prevented the corruption of newly attached pdf files after installation, the problem still persists.

    Again I must cite that for me this corrupt pdf issue is occurring on a webplatform that uses AmazonSES as the email service provider, is there something about the relationship between AmazonSES, Outlook and the CopyFile API that is causing this problem?

    I'll look forward to hearing from you.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  3. Anonymous
    2023-06-14T15:37:10+00:00

    Hi Gabriel,

    Thanks for your response.

    I can confirm that we are running the 64 bit outlook client Microsoft 365 MSO (version 2208 Build 15601.20660). Just to circle back on your comment are we saying that all previously opened attachments are now permanently corrupted and will experience the intermittent failure of opening / downloading from an email?

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments
  4. Anonymous
    2023-06-14T10:21:00+00:00

    Hi All,

    We have installed the latest KB KB5027215 onw a windows 10 22h2 multi session vdi however we still appear to be experiencing the same issue, has anyone else tested the latest update ?

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments