Frits J. Wüthrich wrote:
When I received email in plain text or HTML with attachments, it works OK. However receiving MS Rich Text emails with an attachment, it shows up with the text of the email and a question mark icon with the name Attachment: 1 I am not able to extract the pdf file that I know is in this attachment. I have forwarded the email from Kmail to a Windows Box with Outlook98, and it arrived as if it was never forwarded, with the attachment and all. Is there a way to extract the attachment? Do I need to decode it, and how do I do that?
I just had something similar: person A sends a message containing an attachment to person B, and person B forwards it to me. What I see in KMail are B's words and an attachment with a question mark as icon, and "Attachment: 1" as name. If I open the attachment, I see A's words, plus A's attachment in coded form. The message is Mime-encoded, but KMail does not appear to belong to the type of mail programs that handles Mime-encoded attachments. I know of two methods to retrieve the original attachment: ---- Method 1 ---- Save the attachment, naming it "myfile", for example, and open it with a text editor. Somewhere at the beginning you see something like this: | ------_=_NextPart_000_01C21E66.FE499D90 | Content-Type: application/pdf; | name="Myfile.pdf" | Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 | Content-Disposition: attachment; | filename="Myfile.pdf" | | OF4DKxf6DSK&%AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPADaG7/CQA This last line is the beginning of a large piece of coded text, which is the original attachment, i.e. the pdf file you are looking for. Delete everything before it, so the file starts with OF4D..... etc. Then decode it with mimencode -u myfile -o Myfile.pdf The created Myfile.pdf is the file you are looking for. ---- Method 2 ---- There is the Stuffit program, which deals with many, if not all, cross- platform issues such as these. It's especially popular among Mac users. A free linux version still can be found here: http://www.stuffit.com/stuffit/linux/index.html (click "Download".) It contains the "stuff" and the "unstuff" command. This time, you do not have to remove something from the attachment. If you save the attachment, naming it "myfile", then the command unstuff myfile automatically determines what type of file it is, and creates the original attachment, i.e. the pdf file you were looking for. SH