pdf is corrupted when forwarded from iphone

What email service do you use? Do you have any kind of outbound/inbound email filtering/scanning?

I just had a user complain of the same problem yesterday. This article cleared some things up for me. In particular, why it seems to happen intermittently (actually it's predictable and a known problem). There's no fix for the corrupted email attachment but if the sender downloads the pdf to the phone hard drive then attaches it to an email, the problem does not occur.

Which email service we are talking about?

We are using Rackspace hosted Exchange 2010.  We use their spam filtering service.

Do they have outbound filtering? Something is scanning the file as/before it leaves the Rackspace servers and corrupting the file.

If you send the same PDF to another user that uses the same service does it still corrupt it?

Instead of forwarding the email with PDF attachment, if the sender saves the PDF to their device hard drive then attaches it to a new email, does it corrupt the attachment?

@xKincaidx - yes, the file get corrupted internally as well.  Only happens when forwarded from an ipad or iPhone.  This is not an issue from a workstation.

That is interesting. Have you reached out to Rackspace?

Does it do it every time from any iOS device?

It is user initatied corruption.

Have the user downloaded and opened the PDF before forwarding the email?

If no, the PDF attachment has not been fully downloaded and the attachment will be corrupted for sure.

@xKincaidx - It happens intermittently and I have not been able to replicate it.  My consultant spoke with Rackspace.  They claim it is the receivers workstation AV doing the corruption.  We have our doubts.  I’ve tried opening the email with the pdf from my home computer and it does not open.    

@Tom Beck – I’ve not had users try saving the PDF to their device then attach it to a new email.  It works most of the time when doing the forwarding but there are occasions when it gets corrupted.

If it was me, I would call Rackspace support again. If you have a PDF that corrupts every time from your phone or a staff members phone, you can send it directly to the support tech so they can see the issue.

Then they would be force to escalate it and actually find a solution.

Attachment handling in iOS has been a problem since iOS 4. A simple Google search with the text "pdf corrupted when forwarded from iOS" will yield dozens of links to tech support forums where users are complaining about the problem. The general consensus is that saving the file to the device hard drive then attaching to a new email is the way around the forwarding problem. I'm encouraging my own users to stop using email as a bottomless file cabinet and instead use cloud services like OneDrive or Dropbox to convey files. But it's hard to break old habits.

It's Apple's responsibility to fix the problem in iOS.

We are using Exchange 2013 and Office 365. If this was an issue that affects all iOS devices, we would hear about it from our users.