The customer would report that the attachment is missing from the ticket but there are able to see the attachment in the mailbox.


Attachment size is more than 20 MB


Freshdesk will allow tickets to be created even when the attachments are exceeding the limit - from the email service, we now allow tickets which have attachments upto 50MB to come in, however, all attachments above 20 MB limit will be dropped and this alert will be shown in the ticket - 'Attachment(s) that exceed 20 MB limit have been dropped. Please reach out to the sender.'


This way, the tickets get created and the agents are also notified about the status of the attachment(s).


Attachment size less than 20 MB


If in the mailbox we are able to see the attachment and could confirm that the size is within the limits but still not able to see the attachment in the ticket we have to check the ticket creation logs and confirm if the email hit our server along with the attachments.


Steps to follow to check the logs:-


Step 1:- Check the account details in Freshops Admin.

Step 2:- Login to the pod specific Haystack URL

Step 3:- If you have the email headers, please use the message-id as the search query to get the ticket creation logs. Alternatively, you can use From, To, and Subject of the email with the respective ticket creation time to get the logs.


Query 1:- "subject" AND "from_email_address" 

Query 2:- "message_id"


Sample Ticket:-




Sample Haystack Logs:-



Step 4:- If we are able to see the attachment is present in the creation logs and still the attachment does not appear in the ticket details we can raise L2 along with the logs and email headers. 


Incase you are not able to see the attachments in the parameters then the attachment did not come thorugh while the email was forwarded to freshdesk which has to be checked at the customer's email server team. There are chances that the attachments will be dropped at their server while being forwarded. 


Browser MIME Sniffing


Sometimes the attachments will show up but with a message that it has been removed as shown below:-



This is due to browser MIME sniffing. A browser or an application usually identifies a resource’s MIME type by observing the Content-Type response header in an HTTP response. As per the MIME standards, the content type for the PDF attachment types should be "application/pdf".

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/MIME_types/Common_types

In some of the cases, the attachment type for PDFs is set to application/octet-stream so we are assuming it to be a different application type and not opening in the browser/app.


We can view the content-type from xml view and from the logs as well.



We will be able to accept the attachments only if it is in the proper content type.