Android phone opening email fail

[whodee54]

Any help appreciated with this problem.  Galaxy phone.  Email attachments in received emails always fail to open.  PDF or images.  Phone shows a download attempt but I just get a 'failed' message- after approx 5 minutes trying.

I have had images open at one point - a long time ago- probably 2 OS updates ago that sort of time.   I don't have any problems getting the attachments on my laptop (Win 10, Thunderbird)  which is tethered to my phone.  I have Avast Security on the phone but I would expect a message from that if it blocked a download and there is no such.

I've searched everywhere I can think of but with no success, so time to call in the cavalry. 

[bristolian · Accepted solution]

Hi @whodee54 

Can you open PDF or image (JPG?) files that you download from the internet, using a browser such as Samsung Internet or Google Chrome?

Can you open alternative file types from emails - let's say word or Excel documents? (Assuming you have a viewer app installed)

Can you save the affected file to either your phone's internal storage or SD card, and then use "My files" to browse to it and open it manually?

I'm not personally a fan of add-on A/V apps such as Avast on Android, so I've no idea whether this could be the underlying cause.

[whodee54]

Thanks for the swift response.. I've just tried a suggested solution of stopping gmail and emptying the cache, shutting down and restarting the phone, etc, etc. 

Which has, fingers crossed, solved the problem.  It's a solution I've tried before that didn't work.. then, I have no idea why it worked today!  (except of course my failing memory forgetting what I did last time maybe)

But in answer to your query, no I couldn't open, download, save anything that accompanied an email as an attachment using Gmail.  But I could access the attachment visiting gmail using a browser on the phone, albeit on a pretty small scale.

It hasn't been much of a problem for me until recently, I was happy enough to use my laptop/desktop but I've recently needed to see things more easily on the phone.  But as I say it's currently working as I need it to.

[Katie_B]

Thanks for keeping us updated @whodee54. 

Please be sure to come back and let us know if you need any further support. 

Katie.