It's possible the file is not a text file, or it's a 'Word' type file. Where did you get the file from?

The files come from attachments to emails. I get emails from our vendors with the invoices. I used to be able to just view and then print. Now I have to download to Adobe and print. This happens with all of them. I think it is my email server. I opened my email with a different browser and still had same issue. So I am checking into that.

Check with the sender. I think they are misidentifying the file type (extension). In other words, txt instead of the real file type.

This is happening with all attachments and a co-worker is having the same issues.

Can you provide a link to the problem page that we can check out? No Personal Information Please !

Hi Kathy, if the Gmail email attachments site identifies the files as PDFs, then they should show up in Firefox's built-in PDF Viewer. Is that happening? It has a distinctive black toolbar and the download button looks like this:

If the PDFs are not opening in the PDF viewer, the server may be identifying them in some other manner, such as saying they are plain text. To see what Firefox is being told, you could try this:

right-click the gibberish > View Page Info

On the main "General" tab, a few lines down, look at the Type row. For PDFs, it should say application/pdf and not anything starting with text/. What do you see there?

It is showing text/plain. I went to an old email from my trash can (one that opened normal last week) and it now opens to gibberish also. It shows text/plain. I can open them if I use the "open with" adobe reader but I used to just click view and Firefox would open a window for me to see the attachment. Now all I see is the gibberish when the window opens instead of the invoice.

Here is the window that opened this morning for my attachment.

https://webmail07.register.com/mm/api/email/message/INBOX/6738114160489405662/attachments/0

This is what opens up when we select view. This should be an invoice. This is happening to all of us here at work.

HTTP Status 401 – Unauthorized

Type Status Report

Description The request has not been applied because it lacks valid authentication credentials for the target resource.

I do not know what that means. Why after years of opening up would they suddenly "lack valid authentication credentials"? Is this something our email server needs to address since all of us are having this issue with all our attachments?

Kathy said

FredMcD said

HTTP Status 401 – Unauthorized Type Status Report Description The request has not been applied because it lacks valid authentication credentials for the target resource.

I do not know what that means. Why after years of opening up would they suddenly "lack valid authentication credentials"? Is this something our email server needs to address since all of us are having this issue with all our attachments?

Hi Kathy, your link is not available to the general public; I think you need to be logged into your email in order to see it it. Which makes total sense.

One possible explanation for the PDF being served with the wrong content-type is that the site is simply broken. Another possbility is that the site is trying to serve you some kind of preview first; Gmail and Dropbox do that, for example.

I created an extension to work around the server configuration problem, but it would only help if the scrambled page has a .pdf extension showing in the address bar.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/content-type-fixer/

By default, the extension is snoozing. Click the Zzzz button to turn it on and it will correct the type for a .pdf from text/plain to application/pdf. It also has predefined fixes for .doc, .docx, and various other common file extensions.