Mail Hidden Attachments

[Daniel Hauber]

Hey folks:

I've seen prroblems similar to mine, but not exactly the same, so I'm
wondering if someone can help me out.

I had some problems emailing my boss today, from my Mac to his PC. He
received two Word (v.X) files, whereas I sent what I thought was one.
When I looked at his PC, I saw that he received my intended document,
and a smaller word doc of the same name. He could not open the
smaller one.

I did some testing by sending a word attachment to my webmail. There
were indeed two attachments on the webmail end, of types:
"application/applefile" and "application/msword"

Note that I changed the Normal template in Word this morning, and the
problem seems to have come up since then. I since deleted the Normal
template, in a quest to fix the problem. No dice.

Also note that I have been sending from Mail.app; this has not changed
at all.

Thanks very much for any advice that you can offer to fix the problem.

-Dan Hauber

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Daniel,

Sometimes when sending attachments from Mac to PC, the result is what you
describe: a separate data fork and resource fork. This happens because of
the type of encoding used by the sender. As far as I know, you don't have
encoding options in Apple's Mail.

As long as your boss can open and read the data fork, he can just trash the
resource fork; it isn't necessary. Alternatives are to use an email client
(like Entourage) which allows you to encode for Windows (MIMI/Base 64) or to
zip the file before sending it (that's "zip", not "stuff", unless your boss
has downloaded Stuffit Expander, free at
<http://www.stuffit.com/win/expander/index.html>).

Hope this helps.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>