Almost all incoming emails contain an attachment repeating the contents of the actual message. The attachments are entitled, for example, “ATT00302.htm (2.41KB)” or “ATT00394.htm (825 bytes)”. You discussed a similar issue in a previous column and I followed your advice regarding plain text versus HTML formatted email. After disabling HTML I have addressed an email to myself and the unwanted attachments in my outgoing mail have disappeared, however they still appear in the incoming mail. I have tried the standard procedure of going to the Start menu > Run then typing “sfc/scannow” however a message appears that Windows cannot find the file, so I am unable to verify whether there are any corrupt files on the computer that could be causing this behaviour.

Before going into an in-depth explanation about how we can troubleshoot the messages that you are receiving with the ATT…html attachments we should discuss the reason that these attachments exist. Email messages can be composed in two primary formats – HTML or plain text (there is another format called rich text but we will ignore this possibility since it’s not relevant to our discussion). When you compose an email in HTML it allows you to include various formatting options such as different font sizes, different text, inclusion of images, etc. because the email is essentially a web page (as HTML is the language used to write web pages) and therefore you can include any elements that can be used in a web page. In contrast, if you write a message in plain text then that’s all you get – a message written in plain text with no option for special formatting or anything fancy. Every email client supports plain text messages, since it’s the lowest common denominator for communication (being pure plain text) but not all email clients (particular very old clients) necessarily support HTML email. Granted, practically all modern email clients support the HTML format since it is by far the most popular format for sending emails and thus if you are using any remotely modern computer then you shouldn’t have any problems in this regard.

While there are standards for composing and sending email messages, given the hundreds of different email clients available, each program does treat the emails which they send and receive in a unique way which may not be totally compatible with other email clients. Additionally, the email servers which the messages pass through between sender and receiver could also potentially change various aspects of the message so that it affects how the message will display at the other end. Occasionally I have been asked to assist sending out email newsletters to subscribers and I generally recommend using a mailing list service such as Campaign Monitor (www.campaignmonitor.com) for such bulk mail-outs for many reasons, one of which being that they offer services to show you how your message will display in various different email clients. The fact that such checks are necessary further highlights that all email clients are not necessarily created equal and can display content differently.

So, the ATT…html attachments can be found on email messages for various reasons. The first being that the email client which you are using to receive the messages is not displaying HTML email. As such, a plain text version of the email message is displayed with an HTML attachment so you can view the HTML version by opening that file in another program which supports viewing HTML files (i.e. a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox). Every modern email client should support HTML email so it could be possible that you have disabled this functionality in your email client. Without knowing the exact email client which you are using I am unable to provide further advice for checking this aspect, so this is something that you will need to check. Be sure that you do investigate this possibility as it is likely the most plausible explanation for the problem. In your question you mentioned that after disabling HTML email and sending yourself an email message (in plain text format) that the ATT…html attachments were no longer present on your messages, whereas I presume that they previously did appear when you sent yourself test HTML messages. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that your email client was not reading the HTML message and instead displaying the plain text message with the HTML attachment, but now because you are sending purely plain text messages there is no need for the HTML attachments so they are no longer appearing.

The presence of the HTML attachments will not be affected by the format in which you send email messages – this only affects outbound email messages which you are sending, not how messages that you are receiving are treated. Therefore, I would recommend that you re-enable HTML emails as this will be far more useful in the long-term that just sending plain text messages. Additionally, don’t think that because you are having difficulties receiving HTML emails that a lot of other people are as well. It is likely that you are in a small minority of people who are having problems with HTML email so other people to whom you are sending email messages should be receiving them without major problems.

However, if you find that enabling HTML email does not fix the problem, or this setting was already enabled, then the problem is likely related to the format of message which is being sent to you. In this case there probably isn’t much we can do in the email client to resolve this problem because the email client is simply not interpreting the message correctly. In some cases this could be because the sender has placed certain elements in-line within the message (such as a picture in the middle of the email) and your email client cannot understand in-line elements so it treats that element, plus everything after the image in the message, as an attachment and places them into an ATT…html file attached to the email message. You can usually tell this is the case because the email message stops somewhat abruptly, since the remainder of the message is contained in the attached file. The only resolution in this situation is to change email clients, as the current one which you are using does not seem to properly understand the format of messages. Since you say that almost all incoming messages have the problem, it is likely that the sender is not the cause because almost all messages are affected, which have been presumably sent from a range of different senders, so it is unlikely that all of their email clients are not working correctly instead of just your email client not working correctly.

Since you are using Windows a few alternative email clients which you could consider are Mozilla Thunderbird (www.mozilla.com/thunderbird) which is a free, open-source email client. Alternatively, if you would like to stay with the Microsoft offerings, then you may wish to consider Windows Live Mail (which is the newer version of Outlook Express).

So, as we have discussed throughout this solution, the root cause of the problem is due to your email client not properly understanding the HTML portion of the message, instead treating it as an attachment rather than displaying the content in the message window. As such, the problem is not likely to be related to a corrupt file. For future reference though, the reason that the System File Checker utility is not running is because you are missing a space between the “sfc” and the “/scannow” portion of the command. The correct command is “sfc /scannow” (notice the subtle space in between the two elements). This is because the “sfc” portion is the actual name of the program, and the “/scannow” portion is called a switch, which allows us to pass a bit of information to the executable, explaining what we want it to do. In this case, we want it to scan for corrupt files now, thus the “/scannow” switch.