Absolute path link to pdf - not working for some users

[tonynoriega]

We have a mass emailing tool at our company (develped in house) that sends plain text and html emails to our subscribers. very simple .net tool.

we put an absolute path URL link to a PDF on our website, and some of our subscribers are saying that they cant open it because they are getting a dialog box that says its an executable file. thus they are scared to open, or run it.

what would cause that message to appear?

[tedster]

Your server may not have a correct MIME type set for the .pdf extension. It should be set as "application/pdf"

[tonynoriega]

Well it only happens to certain users... not all...

and i can open it just fine.

one user is on IE6 Win XP... could it be their email client? or their IIS server?

[tedster]

I guess it might be email client security - but different browsers do treat incorrect MME types differently, so forgive and some complain.

[choster]

I would definitely check the MIME type.

PDFs behave differently depending on how each user's workstation is set up; sometimes it opens inside the browser, sometimes it opens an external application automatically, and sometimes it simply opens a dialog box asking the user what to do with it.

In order to force the third scenario across browsers (since Internet Explorer ignores the "attachment" delivery method), there is terrible advice floating out on the web directing webmasters to remove the MIME type for PDF. This causes the web server to mark it as "application/octet-stream," in other words "some kind of unknown binary file." This does cause the dialog box to open, because the browser won't have a default behavior configured for that type, but as you might expect, trying to open a link containing an unknown binary from an e-mail is a flashing, screaming, red flag to some firewalls and antivirus software.

[penders]

What if they don't have a PDF reader on their machine?

[Jonesy]

Click on it with "Live HTTP headers" active.
What do you see there?