Eudora (and other email programs) provide a mechanism for attaching arbitrary binary files (Word documents, programs GIF's of your dog) to email messages. Unfortunately there are quite a variety of ways messages can be encoded and there's no gurantee that an attachment sent with one email program will be smoothly received by another email program (or even the same program!)
One popular message of encoding called Base64 (or Apple Double, or MIME) is often not handled very smoothly by Eudora. Instead of Eudora asking you where it should save the attached file, part of your message looks like this:
-========================_35844337==_D Content-Type: application/msword; name="geo.doc" ; x-mac-type="5744424E" ; x-mac-creator="4D535744" Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="geo.doc" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 /jcAIwAAAAAAAAQAABkAAAAAAAAAAAEAAABoIgAAegwAAAAAAABm0gAAAAAAAABPAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAdgABIQAAdgABIQAAdyEAAAAAdyEAAAAAdyEADgAAdy8ArAAA d9sAAAAAd9sAAAAAd9sAEAAAd+sAFgAAeAEAFgAAeBcAAAAAeBcAXgAAeHUAeAAAd9sA AAAAeO0AIAAAeQ0AGAAAeUsAKgAAeXUAAAAAdyEAAAADAAMAAHlLAAAAAHklACYAAHlL AAAAAHlLAAAAAHl1AJcAAHlLAAAAAHlLAAAAAHlLAAAAAHlLAAAAAHlLAAAAAHlLAAAA
etc.....
Often you receive not one but several messages in this format. (Usually this is just one message that has been broken into several parts by Eudora) The procedure for turning these into readable files is fairly simple, and frequently successful.
First you need to save all the parts of the message as one file. Select the first message of the series from you IN box and then hold down Shift while clicking on the last message of the series to select all the messages. Then select Save As from the File menu. Save the message with whatever name you'd like, being sure to turn the Guess Paragraphs option off. Then start up the program MPack (if you don't have a copy contact your computing support person). Select decode from the File menu, and then select your newly saved email file. After clicking on decode you should get one or more files. Hopefully one of these is the one that was originally attached to the email message. If you have a program that can read the file (such as Word if the file was a Word file) you should be able to open the file from within the appropriate program. Simply double-clicking may not work on these newly created files. Keep in mind that nothing in this procedure will allow you to read file formats that you computer normally can't.
Good Luck!
Maintained by Sean
Fox, sfox@carleton.edu
Last updated: Thursday, 31-Aug-2000 12:26:13 CDT