Rescue garbled attachments sent from 10.4 to Gmail

Dec 09, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ptone

There seems to be some issue with the way IMAP in Gmail handles attachments sent via Tiger's Mail.app -- they often appear as generic "mime-attachments" with no apparent way to decode them on the receiving end. While I'm not sure of where exactly the problem is being introduced, I have found a way to rescue these attachments.

The key comes from this hint. However, trying to use openssl on the mime-attachment will fail until you remove the headers. You need to delete the parts above the encoded data that look like this:

--Apple-Mail-3-1071339734
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/applefile;
	name=file.doc
Content-Disposition: attachment;
	filename="file.doc"
Take note of the filename, and then use it in the command referenced in the earlier hint like this:
openssl base64 -d -in mime-attachment -out file.doc
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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