Hotmail Tech Support Cannot Open Attachments 18 years, 7 months ago by Martey Dodoo

When I got this email, I was not sure whether I should laugh or cry:

Hello Martey,

Thank you for writing to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.

This is Nat and I will be assisting you today.

Due to safety and security reasons, we are not authorized to open any attachment. If you have received an unsolicited e-mail with the Hotmail domain name in either the header information or the body of the message, please copy and paste the complete and unedited copy of the e-mail to your reply to us with full message headers exposed so that we can investigate each instance.

Now, there are plenty of reasons why a company might have a policy of not allowing their employees to open email attachments. None of the reasons that I can think of apply to the Technical Support department of an email company. If they do not consider email attachments safe enough for their technical representatives to open, why do they let Hotmail users open them?

I probably would have given Nat the benefit of the doubt if the attachment was something sketchy like "microsoft.exe." Had he looked at the "complete and unedited copy of the e-mail" that I had sent to him, he might have realized that the attachment was text-based.