PDF file gets wiped clean when emailing to a gmail address?

Recently, my friend and I experienced something odd.

I emailed him two 1-page PDF files that were made by printing an Excel sheet with PDF Writer. They were about 9K in size each.

One arrived in tact and readable, the other was BLANK!

Figuring this was my mistake, I re-printed the sheet and sent BOTH the original version and the newly created version. BOTH were blank on his end!

Figuring this was a compatability problem, I had my friend email them both back to me. They were BLANK to me as well!

Wondering what could have happened to the file itself, I went through the following troubleshooting steps:

- I had my friend SAVE the file, never open it, and send it back to me. It was blank to me.

- I emailed him the file from another email account. Still blank.

- I ZIPPED both versions of the file in a .zip file and emailed him again - now he could read BOTH! Thus confirming the file was, indeed, rendered blank by the emailing process


The following should be noted:

- I was emailing him at his gmail account, originally from hotmail and then bellsouth.

- The excel sheet which failed was actually a variation on the first (which suceeded). It was an invoice and all I did was change a couple cells and do a "save as" the new file. Otherwise it was identical.

- The PDF files were created using the PDF Writer which was installed when installing Acrobat 5.0


So... has anyone heard of PDF files being stripped of their content when being emailed? Any ideas why this would happen?

I have a solution to the problem (zipping PDF files) but this situation has piqued my curiosity since I've never heard of such a thing. My friend, a systems programmer, hasn't either (even though email is not his specialty).

 

Perhaps they were intercepted by the mail servers, for these reasons.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Highly-Critical-PDF-Vulnerability-43487.shtml
http://www.pcworld.com/article/138749/adobe_patches_critical_pdf_vulnerability.html
While these reports are a bit dated and patches have been issued since, at least something to go on.

 

Thanks, markp.

It doesn't explain what DID happen but as you said, it could at least explain part of it.

I am still curious to see if anyone comes across this thread who has had experience with such a thing.