What to do if Gmail attachments are not downloaded correctly

The following guide provides you with instructions on how to restore Gmail email attachments that are not properly downloaded to your devices.
Mike, the Linux guy here on Ghacks, sends his articles to my Gmail account. I retrieve these emails using the Thunderbird email client, and that works pretty well usually.
Recently though I noticed that some of the files attached to his emails, images especially, were not downloaded properly anymore.
The low file size of 47 Kilobytes or less was a dead giveaway, as Mike's fullscreen desktop images had a size of more than 1 Megabyte usually.
When I opened the image attachments, all I got was some content at the very top, and a blank, seemingly corrupt area underneath that. It looked cut off already, and it was clear that the attachment was not downloaded properly to the device.
Emails take the following way if you download them using a third-party program on a device you use:
- The sender sends the email with the attachments using a mail service, e.g. Gmail.
- The recipients mail service, Gmail or another, picks the email up, and adds it to the recipients account.
- Thunderbird, or another third-party program, runs checks for new emails, and downloads it and its attachments to the local device.
Things can go wrong when the email is downloaded on your device. The best way of finding out whether this is indeed the case, is to go to the Gmail website to find out if the file attachments are corrupt there as well, or if they are not.
So, simply open Gmail in your web browser of choice, sign in to your Google account if you are not signed in already, and either browse the list of emails, or use the search to find the particular email you are looking for.
Gmail displays all image attachments, and some other formats such as documents, as inline previews. This enables you to quickly assess whether a file attachment is corrupt or not.
As you can see on the screenshot above, only one of the three image attachments was indeed corrupt, while the two other ones showed up just fine on Google's servers.
You can then use the download button to download the working attachments to your system. They are not linked when you open the email message in the program you are using, but it is better than nothing.
Some email clients may allow you to retrieve emails again, but Thunderbird does not support the feature it seems.
What if the email attachments are corrupt on Gmail as well?
There is only one thing that you can do if file attachments on Gmail are corrupt as well: notify the sender about this, so that the attachments are sent again.
One thing that you can do if this happens regularly is to use Google Drive instead for storing the attachments.
This has the effect that the files are not attached to the email which in turn means that corruption cannot occur anymore. You may add links to these emails that point to the files on Google Drive, so that the recipient can download them right away.
This is done in the following way on Gmail:
- Select the compose button to compose a new email, or reply to an email you received previously.
- Locate the "insert files using Drive" button in the compose window and activate it.
- This opens a new window that you may use to upload files to Drive, and to select files on Drive for inclusion in the email.
- Drive supports adding the files as Drive links, or as attachments to the email you are composing. The Drive link option is selected by default.
- Please note that this changes the visibility of the drive file. Anyone with the link may view the file. It is recommended that you add additional forms of protection, e.g. by using encryption and not including the password in the email, to add better protection to the file.
The email includes links that point to each file attached to it on Google Drive. A Google account is not required to view the files.
Now You: Do you encounter corrupt email attachments frequently?


You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!