E-mail Recipients receive two attachments

  • Thread starter Carl & Mary Jane Swedberg
  • Start date
C

Carl & Mary Jane Swedberg

Greetings. My non-Mac E-mail recipients tell me that they keep getting two
attachments when I send E-mails, one they can open and one which doesn't?
Think this may be a Mac to Windoze issue, maybe something to do with MIME
transmission? I notice that when I send an E-mail with attachments, a
window appears saying encoding attachments and it 'blinks' once for/during
each attachment, almost as if it was sending twice. Can anyone explain
this?
 
Y

Yann

It's because when you send for example a jpg document, you have the
choice of sending it as :
- Any computer (Apple double)
- Macintosh
- Windows
- Unix

If you choose "any computer", then the mac will send 2 files, one in a "mac"
format (extended names, etc...), AND in the windows format (short names,
etc...)

If you choose "Macintosh", some PC may not display the attachement
correctly.

if you choose "Windows", the PC, but also the Mac, will display the
attachement.
 
W

Walt Basil

Greetings. My non-Mac E-mail recipients tell me that they keep getting two
attachments when I send E-mails, one they can open and one which doesn't?
Think this may be a Mac to Windoze issue, maybe something to do with MIME
transmission? I notice that when I send an E-mail with attachments, a
window appears saying encoding attachments and it 'blinks' once for/during
each attachment, almost as if it was sending twice. Can anyone explain
this?
Click to expand...

This is because you are sending them compressed with something other than
"Encode for Windows."

The Mac file system is different than Windows. Each Mac file contains two
forks: a data fork and a resource fork. When a Windows recipient receives
this file, it interprets the two forks as two separate files. In fact, you
can see it compressing something twice if you watch close enough when it is
sending it.

You can change the default encoding in your preferences, or you can choose
at the time of sending.

To change it at the time of composing, with the attachment window open in
your composed email, you see it probably says Encode for any computer
(AppleDouble); no compression; Windows file name extensions." Click on it
and change it to "Encode for Windows (Base64/MIME); no compression; Windows
file name extensions."

To change it for good, open your preferences for Entourage and look for
"composing." Change the "Encode for" field to the Windows option.
 
B

Bill Weylock

It is certainly not supposed to be sending two files. You are all talking as
if that is to be expected. I've been sending email for years with
AppleDouble as the preference. People do not get two files. If Entourage is
doing that, it's a bug and not something Mac users should be having to deal
with.
 
W

Walt Basil

It is certainly not supposed to be sending two files. You are all talking as
if that is to be expected. I've been sending email for years with
AppleDouble as the preference. People do not get two files. If Entourage is
doing that, it's a bug and not something Mac users should be having to deal
with.
Click to expand...

I have dealt with it the entire time I have used a Mac. Sometimes the
recipient's client gets it right, sometimes it doesn't.

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/compression.html#Anchor-com2>
 
W

Walt Basil

It is certainly not supposed to be sending two files. You are all talking as
if that is to be expected. I've been sending email for years with
AppleDouble as the preference. People do not get two files. If Entourage is
doing that, it's a bug and not something Mac users should be having to deal
with.
Click to expand...

Another option is to use some utility that removes the resource fork from a
file. You can do a search on versiontracker.com and see a whole list of
these, most of them free.

Once you remove the fork, and you open that particular file again in it's
native application, the fork will be re-written and you will have to remove
it again.
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

It's not Mac users who have to deal with it if they don't want to. It's
Windows users. Windows programs are supposed to know not to display the
resource-fork-extra-file which is specified as mac-only in AppleDouble
encoding. But some do. And we have to put up with winmail,dat files coming
from Outlook.

Whether you like it or not, Bill, AppleDouble DOES send attachments encoded
with extra mac-only material: it's not supposed to appear as a file, but is
separately encoded. That's what the "Double" means. The second encoding (or
"file") has the creator-type and file-type information which allows Mac mail
recipients to know which application can open it and which icon to display,
even if there's no extension on the file name. (Now in Mac OS X, mac files
are no longer required to have creator type and file type if they have an
extension, but most still do. In OS 9 and earlier, it was absolute.) On
Windows, you need an extension for that. On Mac OS X, either creator type or
extension will do. Mac email programs still send out the creator and file
type file in case the recipient is a mac program that needs it, when sending
AppleDouble encoding. They also include header information such as:

x-mac-creator="53495421";
x-mac-type="53495435"

in the message headers for the attachment, and then proceeds to encode the
main file in mime/base64. A Windows program is supposed to notice those two
headers and ignore the mac-only stuff. Some of them aren't configured with
that in mind, and so display the mac-only encoding as if it were a separate
file.

Entourage is doing the right thing. It's a mail protocol. It's the Windows
mail recipients which aren't doing the right thing.

If you don't want this to happen, then on your end you can choose to encode
as mime/base64 instead. All your Windows recipients will be happy, and many
Mac recipients, especially on OS X, will also manage just fine. As long as
they can receive attachments from Windows OK, they can also get these OK
from you. Always remember to include the extension; that way Windows and Mac
OS X and even Mac OS 9 recipients with File Exchange set up OK will know
what to do with these.


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Entourage you are using - **2004**, X
or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.
 
B

Bill Weylock

Paul -


Thinking back I remember that I used to take pains to save graphics files
without a resource fork (or ³for web² use in some preferences). But it¹s
been a long time since I have even thought to worry about that.

Jpegs, gifs, pdfs, word docs, excel spread sheets, powerpoint files fly out
of here all the time, and problems at the other end are very rare. I also
send copies to myself so that I can grab them off the server with Outlook or
Eudora on my PC, and they always come through just fine. I just sent myself
a pdf to test this, and it opened beautifully in Outlook with no extras. I
guess older email software, as you say, is what causes the problem. I guess
I¹m spoiled.

Of course it is such a habit now that I forget that I used to have problems
before I learned to add extensions. I honestly thought that such issues were
well in the past. I¹m OS X spoiled now and have ³hide extensions² turned on
for most apps, so I forgot. Saving files, I do go out of my way to make sure
they have extensions, but it¹s second nature.

Where I DO have a consistent problem is when I copy folders or groups of
files from the Mac over to the PC. Then I get an array of files with a ._
prefix. I assume those are the resource fork files, and I am guessing that
is how they display in someone¹s email attachment list.

Sorry to interfere with your support, but I did learn something too. Thanks.


Best,


- Bill
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

Of course it is such a habit now that I forget that I used to have problems
before I learned to add extensions. I honestly thought that such issues were
well in the past. I¹m OS X spoiled now and have ³hide extensions² turned on
for most apps, so I forgot. Saving files, I do go out of my way to make sure
they have extensions, but it¹s second nature.

Where I DO have a consistent problem is when I copy folders or groups of files
from the Mac over to the PC. Then I get an array of files with a ._ prefix. I
assume those are the resource fork files, and I am guessing that is how they
display in someone¹s email attachment list.
Click to expand...

Those are invisible files that tell the file system what's in the folder, I
think. They're Unix directory files of some type (I'm not an expert). They
show up also in the classic Mac OS, not just in Windows. In fact, if you
have a computer more than 18 months old or so and can boot into OS 9, you'll
see all those files when you look over to your OS X sector. In fact, even in
Classic within OS X itself, any File/Open or File/Save browsing from a
classic app will include those invisible files. In Unix-land, prefacing a
file name with a "." makes it invisible. the "._" is for these directory
files.
Sorry to interfere with your support, but I did learn something too. Thanks.
Click to expand...

There's no interfering. This is just a discussion here. I'm just a user like
you.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Entourage you are using - **2004**, X
or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.
 
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