About attachments, encoding, etc?

[Jonny]

A friend of mine on a PC mailed me and wrote:

"I was today sent a zip/stuffit?? file from a colleague with a mac - in
each folder the files seem to be duplicated with similar files prefixed
with a .- so index.htm is also there as .-index.htm and so on.
Is this normal when transferring between the two OS's?
Should I remove these .- files and return just the files without this
prefix? "

I replied:

"I think this might happen when/if the sender on Mac has wrong encoding
method configured for attachments in the mail client. I use Microsoft
Entourage, and it has four options. The one I use (the correct one) is
"Apple Double", which is for "any computer". Ask whoever sent the
attachment to look into the preferences and fix this.
Which files you should use? I dunno. "

Did I give him correct advice, or did I make things worse?

TIA
Jonny

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

Yes, this is normal.

The '.-' file is the separately encoded and sent resource fork, which is
useless to a PC.

You must have used 'appledouble' encoding to get this - that is how it
works. The two forks are encoded separately, and only recombined if the
reciving client is a mac programme that understands appledouble (most of
them)

Your windows recipient can safely throw away the spare bits.