Can't view attachments

I have always been able to either view or download attachments in my emails. All of a sudden I can no longer just view them. I get an error message saying I have to download. This happens on every device that I read my emails on.

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Trina4

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2 Messages

19 days ago

I have talked to Comcast/Xfinity twice about this same issue, they still have not resolved it. After 20 years I am switching, I've had enough of this.

4

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Bnjvoris

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14 Messages

@Trina4 They must have bigger problems that require immediate attention, I guess?

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18 days ago

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XfinityJustinC

Official Employee

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1.7K Messages

@Trina4 thank you for taking time to reach out here over Xfinity Forums. I completely understand the frustration with not being able to view attachments on your email. Reviewing the post I see some great community members have provided some work arounds that have helped them:

- Check to see if the download option will pull up the attachment
- Send the email to a 3rd party client to view

I checked out engineer board and don't see an open ticket. We do have a team that is dedicated to email support when issues arise. Have you contacted the Customer Security Assurance team? The easiest way to reach out is to go here: https://spa.xfinity.com/help > select Postmaster > Report an issue.

Please let me know if this is helpful.

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17 days ago

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Trina4

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2 Messages

I have a ticket number [Edit: Personal Information]. I've already switched to gmail.

(edited)

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17 days ago

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XfinityAdrienne

Official Employee

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1.6K Messages

I completely understand where you are coming from, @Trina4. That certainly is not the experience we want for our customers, we will certainly submit the feedback. Please let me know if you have any other questions/concerns, we are here to help.

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17 days ago

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user_wlzpt2

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1 Message

18 days ago

I am having the same issue out of the blue it happened!

1

XfinityMartyR

Official Employee

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2.6K Messages

user_wlzpt2 Thanks for reaching out! Are you able to log into the Xfinity Email Web Portal and view the attachments?

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16 days ago

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avishomes

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2 Messages

16 days ago

Same here. It is all on Comcast. This is not an issue as they say, but this is a problem. [Edited: "All Caps"]

(edited)

1

XfinityGabriel

Official Employee

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2.7K Messages

avishomes, Hi there! Thanks for taking the time to reach out. As someone who needs to open attachments from my emails from time to time, I can understand the inconvenience that this can cause. I am sorry to learn about this experience. We are the right place to go for support. Have you tried another browser or any of the work arounds that my awesome colleague mentioned here?

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14 days ago

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user_kmg2gd

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1 Message

15 days ago

I am having the same issue just starting in the past week or so. Please find a true fix!

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XfinityGabriel

Official Employee

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2.7K Messages

user_kmg2gd, Good day to you. Thanks for reaching out to XFINITY about not being able to view attachments. I can certainly the importance of getting this fixed. You've come to the right place for help. Since it has been 2 days since you reached out, are you still experiencing this issue at this time? Have you tried any troubleshooting steps or the download option to pull up the attatchment?

I am an Official Xfinity Employee.
Official Employees are from multiple teams within Xfinity: CARE, Product, Leadership.
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13 days ago

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BruceW

Gold Problem Solver

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26.8K Messages

15 days ago

@XfinityMartyR wrote: "... Are you able to log into the Xfinity Email Web Portal and view the attachments?"

No. You haven't tried to open a PDF email attachment using the "Xfinity Email Web Portal" lately, have you? It doesn't work! Instead of displaying the file as it did until a few weeks ago, an error message is displayed:

"An error occurred while loading the document so it cannot be displayed. Please download the file using the button below."

Please be aware that there are 2 kinds of responses in this Forum: Replies and Comments. When you Comment on a post by scrolling down to "Comment on this post here...", I am notified of your response. But if you select Reply, I am NOT notified and may not be aware of your response.

(edited)

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philipj

Contributor

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51 Messages

15 days ago

Following this to see if/when there is a solution. Very annoying problem.

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luvmydogs

Visitor

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1 Message

Same issue here. Same error message.

I cannot believe this has not been addressed.

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14 days ago

XfinityNatalie

Official Employee

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373 Messages

Hey there, philipj! Thanks for taking the time to reach out on our XFINITY Community Forum thread. I appreciate you following up with the updates for this issue. To ensure we can work towards resolving this matter with our Customer Security Assurance team, please report this here at https://spa.xfinity.com/help > select Postmaster > Report an issue.

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13 days ago

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Bnjvoris

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14 Messages

14 days ago

Visitor

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13 Messages

8 days ago

@XfinityVictor , @XfinityEmilyB , @XfinityMarshante , @XfinityPaula , @XfinityMartyR , @XfinityJeff , @XfinityQuemekia , @XfinityMarcus , @XfinityAlyssaA , @XfinityEricB ,@XfinityAirelle ,@XfinityJon ,@XfinityJustinC ,

All of you comcast employees have kindly replied to our ( all comcast email users) issue concerning the viewing of email attachments. All of you have asked the usual, necessary and preliminary questions that users always get: Did you restart your device? Did you clear cache and cookies? What kind of device are you using?....etc.

I now have a question for all of you. Do you use comcast email, and if so, can you please go to one of your emails that has an attachment. Now, open that attachment and view it. Do not download, just view it. Was that successful or did you get this error msg?

"An error occurred while loading the document so it cannot be displayed. Please download the file using the button below."

Please let me know your answer.

I re-posted this in the New Post section rather than 'reply' so that all of you will see it.

Thank you

0

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user_0vn6bq

Visitor

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1 Message

14 days ago

I have been experiencing this issue for several weeks now. I have done all the suggested fixes with no success. It seems they are not making any effort to resolve this problem. Extremely frustrating

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XfinityThomasC

Official Employee

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2.9K Messages

@user_0vn6bq Did this issue start when Comcast reported they would be moving all comcast.net email accounts to Yahoo Mail? Does clicking the button load the attachment or are you getting the same error?

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12 days ago

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user_fx87qz

Visitor

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2 Messages

14 days ago

I've been having this problem with pdf and docx files but not jpeg files. I've used Chrome and Firefox and I am not using a third party. What's the solution Comcast?

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user_sk721

Visitor

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3 Messages

14 days ago

We keep responding and they keep ignoring us

1

Again

Expert

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32.7K Messages

@smartinkowski

We keep responding and they keep ignoring us

No one is ignoring you. The employees here can only pass along the problem to someone who can look into it further; they aren't able to fix it from here.

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13 days ago

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user_d73ldg

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1 Message

14 days ago

Very annoying problem to have to download attachments, which started a few weeks ago after many years of being able to easily and immediately view them. I don't understand why an enormous company like Comcast can't fix this problem to make it easier for their customers. After all the complaints on this page, it's apparent that Comcast just doesn't care if they make things more difficult for us.

0

Again

Expert

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32.7K Messages

13 days ago

Hopefully @XfinityAlex can look into this deeper and come up with a solution or reason as to why this has stopped working. In the meantime, be patient because this is a wide spread issue. FWIW, viewing a PDF does not work for me, but I can view photos [.jpg, .png] with no problem. PDF's, however, do want you to download it.

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XfinityAlex

Official Employee

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938 Messages

@Again I'm passing to the responsible team. I'll try to verify from my end as well

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11 days ago

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Again

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32.7K Messages

@XfinityAlex

@Again I'm passing to the responsible team. I'll try to verify from my end as well

Thanks for the response, Alex. Let us know!

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11 days ago

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Latoque

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29.8K Messages

13 days ago

For any OEs reading this thread, I am using an iMac running Brave in Mac OS Monterey. In either Brave or Firefox I see this trying to view a pdf file attachment in the Comcast webmail UI----------------

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mal316

New Poster

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3 Messages

I have the same issue, experiencing it for several months now. This works for me:

1) "View" the attachment (PDF in my case). There are a couple of ways to view; click on the word View itself, or click on the filename and select View.

2) You will see the "An error occurred..." message.

3) Leave that message up. Look for the hamburger icon above on the right. First you'll see the magnifying-plus icon, then the magnifying-minus icon, then the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines stacked), then the download icon, the (i)nfo icon, and finally the X icon. Select the hamburger icon.

4) You should see a "Print as PDF" selection. Select it.

5) A new browser tab will open with the PDF displayed in it. You can view, download or print at this point.

Best of luck!

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13 days ago

Again

Expert

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32.7K Messages

@mal316

I have the same issue, experiencing it for several months now. This works for me:

1) "View" the attachment (PDF in my case). There are a couple of ways to view; click on the word View itself, or click on the filename and select View.

2) You will see the "An error occurred..." message.

3) Leave that message up. Look for the hamburger icon above on the right. First you'll see the magnifying-plus icon, then the magnifying-minus icon, then the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines stacked), then the download icon, the (i)nfo icon, and finally the X icon. Select the hamburger icon.

4) You should see a "Print as PDF" selection. Select it.

5) A new browser tab will open with the PDF displayed in it. You can view, download or print at this point.

Best of luck!

For me, in Firefox, I have set Foxit PDF Reader as my default PDF reader and so, the program window opens with my PDF file I used as a test, not a new tab, but here, it's all in how you have your browser and reader set up. But, yes, this does work, it's just tedious. Great work around @mal316 !

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12 days ago

BruceW

Gold Problem Solver

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26.8K Messages

13 days ago

@mal316 wrote: "... This works for me: ..." (for PDFs)

Rewording a bit:

"View" the PDF attachment.
On the "An error occurred..." screen, open the "More actions" hamburger icon at the top-right.
Select "Print as PDF".
The browser print dialog will open and you can use it to view, download or print the PDF. Note that, behind the scenes (in Firefox on Windows at least) the file is downloaded into the "Downloads" folder.

This also seems to work for .DOCX files.

Thank you @mal316! Good catch!

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(edited)

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BruceW

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26.8K Messages

13 days ago

4 days ago @XfinityJustinC wrote: "... I checked out engineer board and don't see an open ticket. ..."

Given that Comcast/Xfinity is getting out of the email business, I'll be surprised if they bother to fix this. If they finish with the exit process as they predict by sometime in 2026, why would they bother? Of course, they should fix it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Please be aware that there are 2 kinds of responses in this Forum: Replies and Comments. When you Comment on a post by scrolling down to "Comment on this post here...", I am notified of your response. But if you select Reply, I am NOT notified and may not be aware of your response.

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user_39441t

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1 Message

I have the same the same problem hopefully this gets fixed soon

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9 days ago

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Email

Bnjvoris

Can't view attachments

Trina4

Bnjvoris

XfinityJustinC

Trina4

XfinityAdrienne

user_wlzpt2

XfinityMartyR

avishomes

XfinityGabriel

user_kmg2gd

XfinityGabriel

BruceW

Please be aware that there are 2 kinds of responses in this Forum: Replies and Comments. When you Comment on a post by scrolling down to "Comment on this post here...", I am notified of your response. But if you select Reply, I am NOT notified and may not be aware of your response.

philipj

luvmydogs

XfinityNatalie

Bnjvoris

user_0vn6bq

XfinityThomasC

user_fx87qz

user_sk721

Again

user_d73ldg

Again

XfinityAlex

Again

Latoque

mal316

Again

BruceW

Please be aware that there are 2 kinds of responses in this Forum: Replies and Comments. When you Comment on a post by scrolling down to "Comment on this post here...", I am notified of your response. But if you select Reply, I am NOT notified and may not be aware of your response.

BruceW

Please be aware that there are 2 kinds of responses in this Forum: Replies and Comments. When you Comment on a post by scrolling down to "Comment on this post here...", I am notified of your response. But if you select Reply, I am NOT notified and may not be aware of your response.

user_39441t

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