> Can’t view attached PDFs
I get regular newsletters on my iPad Pro, but fir some reason I can’t open any of them. The sender says that they’re PDFs, but when I try opening them they revert to a “MIME attachment.” How do I fix this?
This almost certainly isn’t a problem at your end, but the person sending out these newsletters isn’t doing this in a way which is compatible with modern email client apps.
Email messages are quite primitive, and almost always use a system known as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) to embed attachments in messages. The message contents are divided into parts, each marked out as being the text, any encoded binary file, and other data. When the Mail app receives a message in MIME format, as most are, it recognizes each of those parts and handles them according to their contents. The message itself is displayed, and those attachments received in other parts are decoded and shown appropriately. An attached PDF file will be split out, decoded, and then either displayed in line with the message or as a discrete enclosure.
If Mail can’t recognize these newsletters properly, something is going wrong with the way they’re being enclosed as MIME attachments. The software being used to create them may not be encoding them correctly, or writing out each of the parts of the message. It’s likely that the person composing these messages is using an option which inadvertently causes these issues with their attachments. You’ll need to help them understand the problem they’re creating so they can solve it for you.