MAC OS X 'Mail' program

**droliff** · March 18th, 2003, 09:06 AM

Hello all,

I am a commercial photographer and send attachments (jpegs) in my e-mails to clients on a daily basis. I recently switched to Mac OS X and to the OS X 'Mail' program.
I previously used Netscape's mail program.
I have received complaints from several clients that they cannot read/open the attachments I have sent :-(. I did some research and found that the OS X 'Mail' program automatically uses the MIME/Base 64 encoding scheme for sending attachments. I need to be able to send attachments without encoding them.
It appears that the OS X mail program does not have this option. I really like the layout and ease of use of this program otherwise. Does anyone know how I would make a request to have an option on the 'attachment encoding scheme' put into place? Any input would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

Dennis

**lurk** · March 18th, 2003, 09:33 AM

That can't be right there is not any way that a jpeg can be sent unencoded because you cannot assume that mail will be transfered 8 bit clean. That is you must always assume that the top bit of any byte can be dropped so binary data like a jpeg will corrupted by going through the mail unprotected.

More likely than not you are suffering from sending a file with a resource fork or no extension which is getting messed up. I know that there have been some problems with this in the past. What is then name of the problem file. If it is "picture" then the windows box will not necessarily know what it is, the Mac only knew because it was saved in the resource fork. Try renaming it "picture.jpg" and see if that works.

If it is not that I don't remember exactly what the fix was but someone else will surely pop up with the answer.

-Eric

PS: You do want to send them as base 64 Mime that is what Netscape and any other "normal" email program uses. Again the problem is recognizing what is in that lump of base64data.

**droliff** · March 18th, 2003, 10:34 AM

Eric,

Thanks for the info. I didn't realize that all e-mail attachments are encoded in some way. When I was using Netscape's mail client I never had any problems with people being able to read my attachments. The files that I attach are jpeg's generated in photoshop and have the file extension .jpg
Here is a sample file

Dennis

**lurk** · March 18th, 2003, 11:12 AM

This thread has some info that may help you.

http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthr...ht=appledouble

Hope that helps. Good luck!

-Eric

**droliff** · March 18th, 2003, 11:36 AM

Eric,

Thanks very much for pointing me to this thread.
It's been very informative. Looks like the mail.app attachment problem
is a universal one. Hope Mac fixes it in the next upgrade.
Until then maybe I'll check out Entourage.

Dennis

**twister** · March 18th, 2003, 01:54 PM

Your picture worked fine for me. I sent it via mail to one of my other accounts. It opened fine in mail and my webmail (not .mac accounts). I also forward lots of pictures and receive lots of pictures various clients on various machines. And i hardly ever get any issues. Maybe it's the way your attaching them? Do you drag and drop or do you choose the attachment via a dialog box?

Also, a time or two, an image hadn't shown up in a message but it said it was attached. So i hit reply or forward and there it was. Weird....

**lurk** · March 18th, 2003, 02:25 PM

Just as a note grabbing the file off of the web site won't make a difference since the webserver will have stripped off the resource fork data. To really work you should have put in on a little disk image and had someone download that.

Gee ain't interoperability fun