BinHex?

[CWLee]

Parties A, B, and C have had no difficulty sending, receiving, and opening
Excel worksheets to and from each other for years. All are using Excel 2000
(9.0.2720). Recently A sent one to B and C which they cannot open. The
error message says this file is not compatible with Excel. A reports others
(D, E, F, etc.) have recently had a similar problem with this particular
worksheet he has sent them, with error messages making reference to "this
must be opened using BinHex 4.0" or "this file is in BinHex format. None of
us have heard of BinHex.

Can anyone here provide any insight into this situation?

In case it helps, a computer resourceful friend of ours looked at the
worksheet file, and reported back as follows:

I looked at this some more yesterday. I determined that if I remove the
first 139 bytes of the file, the resulting remainder works fine.
Somehow an additional 139 bytes are being added to the front of the
file. I really thought it was a macintosh resource fork, but I looked
up the format for such a thing, and these 139 bytes did not follow it.

The 139 bytes had two text strings embedded within it. One was the
original name of the file. The other was "BINAmdos". I don't know what
this means. I did a google on it, and got strange results. Only 4
pages of results. It all looked like web pages that contained similar
corruption. Then I googled "amdos" by itself, and got amdos.com, which
is a site in either chinese or japanese. I think it is some sort of
hacker site because the one english I saw said "what do you want to
pir8", where I think pir8 means pirate, like steal. I looked on the
symantec web site, searching for amdos, but no hits. So it is probably
not a known virus (might not be known yet though). I don't know how it
is getting inserted into your email message. Either by your email
reader program, or when the message travels through some mail server
somewhere on its way to yo! u.

Any constructive ideas/suggestions/comments welcome.

 

[Pat Garard]

I don't know a lot about BinHex, but it is an encoding System
used to encode Binary Files to ASCII characters, when
transmitted as attachments across platforms.

See http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/BinHex.html !

Also Start > 'Help & Support' in Win Xp, and search for 'binhex'
to see about 15 KB articles relating to Outlook Express and to
MS Exchange Server.

I am guessing that A does not use MS Outlook, since it uses
UUENCODE for this purpose.

If you ARE using Outlook, then A has likely changed the 'Send'
Mail Format Options.

Hope this helps.
--
Regards,
Pat Garard
Australia

Anne & Pat Garard.
apgarardATbigpondDOTnetDOTau
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