Can't Receive Attachments (Windows)

ISSUE:

I received a message that's just garbled characters. It was supposed to be an attachment -- what happened?

SOLUTION:

Create a new message and put your own email address in the To: field. Attach a small file (like a .GIF, .JPG, .DOC, .XLS, .ZIP, etc) to it and send the message (try different encoding methods() under Tools: Options: Attachments). Then check for mail - did that attachment arrive properly? If the attachment you sent yourself is unreadable, your mail server or your Internet Service Provider probably has a problem. There's not much you can do except badger the people who maintain the server.

If the attachment you sent to yourself arrived safely - but those from others are sometimes bad - the following applies:

The message was either formatted improperly or mangled during transit, and the encoded attachment was included in the body of the message. Normally, attachments are included in the body during transit of the message, but contain headers that tell Eudora to decode and separate out the attachment. In the message you received, the headers were probably incorrect or missing.

The Internet standard is MIME, and that's the best choice in most situations. Some older and/or non-MIME-compliant systems don't handle this encoding well, however, and some gateways add or strip headers, making it impossible for the receiving mail program to decode the document.

Some potential solutions: ask the person who sent the attachment to you to try sending it encoded with Uuencode or BinHex, instead. If all else fails, you can decode it manually. Here's how:

When you get it, copy all the garbled text into a single, plain text file (use NotePad or WordPad). If the attachment is split up into several messages, select all the messages and choose Save As from the File menu to save all the text into one text file. Open the file in the text editor and edit so that it has no headers. Then save it, being sure you save it as a plain text (ASCII or .TXT) file. Now run a decoding utility on the text file. A good place to download such a utility is -- you can just do a search for the kind of decoding you need (Base64 for MIME attachments; Uuencode; or BinHex).

KEYWORDS: EPWIN, GARBLED ATTACHMENTS, MANGLED, RECEIVE