Clients get corrupted PDF documents (containing forms) in emails?

This is definitely on the side of Adobe/Microsoft. I sent the pdfs for Gmail and they were able to be downloaded and viewed fine. It was only when sending it from Outlook that the files couldn't be opened. I realize these posts were from a couple of years ago. Has anyone made any headway?

Sometimes the problem happens with the sending client. The client does not always recognize that the PDF is a binary file and does not properly encode it as an 8-bit file, but treats it as a 7-bit file, thus the corruption. Be sure that you have the client encode the file in a MIME format. See if that will do the job.

It might be a combination of things, but basically as others have suggested putting the PDF file in an archive solves most of 'em. It's a burden though because some Suzie secretaries don't know how to decompress these files (there are still some OSes that don't have built in Zip decompression or it has been removed for  security reasons). Acrobat PDFs have made a rather notrious name for themselves to as carrying javascript exploits. I hope it doesn't get to the polnt where most corporate IT departments forbid the receptions of any outside PDFs. There are rumblings out there now ...

It used to be quite the pain when I had to send out resumes via PDF.

Hello

This is not exactly the same but we had a similar problem where some customers were unable to read PDFs we emailed them (any type) and we found out eventually it was our firewall.  It was scanning them and causing packet loss (basically little bits of data falling off) and combined with some of our clients email clients they became too corrupted to read.  Another interesting point is that it was mostly a problem with larger corporate customers and government departments, which tend to have more stringent security.

The only help I can offer is that you have to keep experimenting and be broad minded about what may cause it, the first thing you could try is sending them from a PC with a different configuration (OS, security suite etc) and see what happens.

It's generally on their end and not something to do with Outlook.

Some email providors (especially web email) encode the PDF's for a faster transfer but when they are received, they aren't recognized as a PDF so they get corrupted. Not sure why this would happen specifically with forms.

The recommended way to send PDF's is to Zip them (as you have found) first or post them to a web space and email the link for them to download the files.