Mail does strange things to attachments

karavite

karavite

Registered
I have a strange thing happen whenever I send attached Word files from my Mac running OS X 10.1. The file ends up as unreadable gibberish and a few other weird things.

I sent the same file from Mail and from my Yahoo-IE account. When receiving the file on the PC using Notes and then laucnhing it in Word - it is gibberish while the file I sent via Yahoo-IE on the Mac is perfect. When I send the file from Mail to Mail (to me on my Mac) it opens just fine in either Word X or 2000 on my Mac.

Interesting clue? The email messages contain only a single word file, but when viewing the attachment in Notes it lists the Word file PLUS three other files: mime001.txt, mime002.txt and mime003.txt - every time. mime...1 and 3 appear to be empty, but mime002.txt has all the text from the word file, though it contains a million special characters and has lost formatting.

When I receive the file using IE-Yahoo on the PC, there are now two file attachments with the same name as the original - one is gibberish and the other has the perfect word file. It's like that Star Trek episode where the transporter split Captain Kirk into two people - one good, one evil.

Though I'd love to leave the PC world behind me, I really can't do that now and I would like to use my Mac Mail account to send various Office files to people. I am really getting used to Mail (though the spell check interface is awful) and don't want to give it up. Please don't suggest pdfs, other wp software... this really shouldn't be a problem.

Oops - just saw a few posts on this. Oh well, I guess Mail can't handle attachments too well - but hey, it's only the GOD DAMN YEAR 2001. Gee, you think Apple could have saved us all the embarrassment of sending PC users screwed up attachments? I don't believe this.
 
It is recommended you send file attachments of any type compressed to prevent errors while transferring. This is from a Mac or PC. If you're sending to PC users, there are plenty of programs for Mac OS X and earlier that will zip the files so PC users can easily expand them. As for the problem You've described, I've only seen this occur when sending from a PC using Outlook Express with the "break messages apart larger than x kb" checked. I can't find a similar option in Mail.app though.
 
Thanks Jady - and sorry if my post was too emotional - it just seems that PC folks like to take a stab at Macs when they receive files they "can't open" (usually because the Mac user failed to add an extension to the file name), and it just seemed to me that whatever Mail is doing to my attachments should not be a problem out there. I have many people receive my attachments just fine while others cannot read it - haven't been able to pin down what apps everybody is using, but it has caused me to just avoid using Mail, which is a drag because it is so darn pretty.
 
I've had the same problem sending just jpg's through Mail.app.

My PC friends get this gibberish, but some Mac people can open.

Anyone have a fix for this? I shouldn't have to compress something if I don;t want to - especially if it's a 10K jpg... Not even worth it.
 
Even though its from Microsoft, Outlook Express works fine too under OS X. Unfortunately just in Classic mode, but it works! No problems wit file attachements, different user accounts etc.. :)
 
The mime files are some kind of address files. They are not visible on the mac. If you check "Send windows friendly attachments" they shouldn't be seen on the windows pc either.
 
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