Emailing attachments from PC to Mac

[mm]

Sent to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general and
microsoft.public.macintosh.general because afaict it concerns both.

I have a PC and now I have another problem dealing with my same friend
who owns a Mac.**

He's been sending me files about once a week. I convert them to two
other formats (.rtf and .htm) and send them back to him as an 2
ttachments to an email.

We've been doing this for 6 or 9 months but in the last maybe 6 weeks
there has been a problem****

For some reason, he and later his friend who also has a Mac are no
longer getting the entire file, not either of the files***. With the
new shorter files, most of it is legible, but part that appears in
another font comes out as a strange collection of symbols. Both for
the .htm and the .rtf.

Is this a known problem??? An occasional problem???


BTW, I've asked on the Eudora ng and no one offered even a guess, but
a) they maybe know more about the program than they know about email
OR attachements OR operating systems, and b) that was before I knew
about the next paragraph:

****This seems maybe to have happened when I changed from using
win98SE to winXP. For the PC users here, especially, Does that ring
a bell?? It semes strange to me. I'm using the same email program,
Eudora. And although windows handles the file from the time it leaves
Eudora until it gets out of my computer, I'm able to send the same
files to myself, and when I get them, they're the same length as when
I send them and they display fine, both the .rtf and the .htm.

I didn't even reinstall Eudora. I created a second partition for
winXP but I'm still running Eudora out of the first partition. Eudora
isn't so tied to Windows that it has to be installed. It (its set of
files) can just be copied to a new computer and it works fine.

Is there some reason why sending the emails from win98SE would work
and from XP wouldn't????



***
It turns out that one file he sent back to me is 1209 bytes shorter
than the file I sent to him!!!

My FileAble.htm was 88,815 When I got his back it was 87,606 bytes.

The other one. FileBaker.htm, was 1361 bytes shorter than
when I sent it 99,921. When I got it back 98,558 bytes.


**Well he owns four now! a second laptop because his first one broke,
and I fixed it after he got another, and I still haven't heard the
story about the second desktop.

 

[mm]

Please if my question below didn't call up an answer, what newsgroup
should I ask on, or what topic am I'm looking for, what's the keyword,
to try to find out why attachments sent from a PC comuputer no longer
arrive full length at the Mac computer.

Two differen Mac users have told me the same thing, that the
attachment I send them from a PC is illegible when they get it, and
the file is shorter than the one I sent.

 

[Jim]

The attachments are being sent compessed/zipped ? Are they being
unzipped at the destination ?

 

[mm]

The attachments are being sent compessed/zipped ?

No, not the ones I'm talking about.

What's new and interesting today is that my friend's friend FF, who
knows more about Mac than Friend f does, wrote back after I sent him
the a different file than I mentioned but one of the same files I sent
to F. FF said that that it was 112KB long. That about 114,688.
Actually I think it was 114,733, which is for the third file in a row
SHORTER when sent back to me than the file I sent him in the first
place, which was 121,730. About 6997 bytes shorter, about 5%. The
file is only about 384 lines long.

This file was also sent back to me by F and I received it as the same
length that FF says it is, so it looks like it's only losing length
going from PC to Mac. Not the other direction.


** Up to 1023 bytems more, right?. Not significant in this case, but
for the record, the Kilobyte value is the byte value (converted to
kilobytes and) truncated? not rounded? Right?

Are they being
unzipped at the destination ?

I sent him only one zipped file, but he doesn't know yet how to unzip
it. I told him to double click, but I bet he has to do that in Finder,
not in the email as viewed through the email program screen. He
doesn't really know to use Finder, I think, and when I told him to
unzip, I didn't remember Finder. I thought his Mac friend would tell
him how to unzip, but I'm thinking even he might not know how to do
that. ;( Two blind leading the blind?

I should go over to F's apartment, but I just haven't had time.

Thanks.

 

[Paul]

No, not the ones I'm talking about.

What's new and interesting today is that my friend's friend FF, who
knows more about Mac than Friend f does, wrote back after I sent him
the a different file than I mentioned but one of the same files I sent
to F. FF said that that it was 112KB long. That about 114,688.
Actually I think it was 114,733, which is for the third file in a row
SHORTER when sent back to me than the file I sent him in the first
place, which was 121,730. About 6997 bytes shorter, about 5%. The
file is only about 384 lines long.

This file was also sent back to me by F and I received it as the same
length that FF says it is, so it looks like it's only losing length
going from PC to Mac. Not the other direction.


** Up to 1023 bytems more, right?. Not significant in this case, but
for the record, the Kilobyte value is the byte value (converted to
kilobytes and) truncated? not rounded? Right?


I sent him only one zipped file, but he doesn't know yet how to unzip
it. I told him to double click, but I bet he has to do that in Finder,
not in the email as viewed through the email program screen. He
doesn't really know to use Finder, I think, and when I told him to
unzip, I didn't remember Finder. I thought his Mac friend would tell
him how to unzip, but I'm thinking even he might not know how to do
that. ;( Two blind leading the blind?

I should go over to F's apartment, but I just haven't had time.

Thanks.

What encoding options do your email clients have ?

I think on my Mac, I use to use base64 encoding option for
attachments. I think the idea was, either a Mac or a PC receiving
it, would know how to decode it. (It's been quite a while since
I used it.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

"This combination leaves the data unlikely to be modified in transit
through systems, such as email, which were traditionally not
8-bit clean."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_clean

"Binary files cannot directly be transmitted through 7-bit systems.
To work around this, encodings have been devised which use only
7-bit ASCII characters. The most popular of these encodings are
Uuencoding and MIME base64."

HTH,
Paul

 

[mm]

What encoding options do your email clients have ?

It's Eudora, and I'm using MIME encoding. Eudora** has no suboptions
within MIME, so iiuc I don't know if it uses Base64 or not.

The other options that I"m NOT using are BinHex and Uuencode.

The attachments are sent separately, not in the body of the message.

Is it significant that he can read all of the attachment that is in a
standard font, but that in the other font is garbage, a weird
assortment of symbols.

This worked until about 6 weeks ago, which is the same time I changed
from win98SE to WinXP, but I went back to win98SE and sent the files
again and they also came out garbled.

**It occurse to me that I should try sending the files with Outlook
Express, which of course I have. And I should try resending files
from before the problem started, maybe there is something about the
files themsleves, that even after conversion to another format, makes
them not work anymore. I will do that today.

I think on my Mac, I use to use base64 encoding option for
attachments. I think the idea was, either a Mac or a PC receiving
it, would know how to decode it. (It's been quite a while since
I used it.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

These are very interesting. I'll see if maybe OE has the ability to
choose one of these, (but I doubt it. )

 

[mm]

Do you folks realize that everything in the last 5 posts that Jim,
Paul, and I have posted in this thread has also shown up at
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3840446.php

Does that happen with all threads in
microsoft.public.macintosh.general or
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general ?

It looks like people are reading pcreview.co.il and commenting there.
No reference to either newsgroup or to Usenet.

I don't mind, but if an answer had been posted at the url above, I
would never see it!

I only found it because I was googling the topic of the thread. Didn't
find much but I found this very thread.

 

[Jim]

Don`t forget this is the World Wide Web ; everything is seen . Forums
are leeched .

 

[mm]

Sent to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general and
microsoft.public.macintosh.general because afaict it concerns both.

And now to the eudora group as well.

I have a PC and now I have another problem dealing with my same friend
who owns a Mac.**

He's been sending me files about once a week. I convert them to two
other formats (.rtf and .htm) and send them back to him as an 2
ttachments to an email.

We've been doing this for 6 or 9 months but in the last maybe 6 weeks
there has been a problem****

For some reason, he and later his friend who also has a Mac are no
longer getting the entire file, not either of the files***. With the
new shorter files, most of it is legible, but part that appears in
another font comes out as a strange collection of symbols. Both for
the .htm and the .rtf.

Is this a known problem??? An occasional problem???

Using Eudora 7.1 for Windows to send the attachments has given almost
erratic results. From win98, the rtf file was bad and the .htm file
was good (or vice versa). From winXP, it was vice versa of whatever
win98 was.

When I had to go back to win98, neither worked.

So I tried Outlook Express and one came out well when received by my
friedn with the Mac.

So it seems like OE is more reliable when sending attachements from a
PC to a Mac.

Later, something must have changed in the source file because both
..rtf and .htm came out well. Tehn I tried Eudora again, and one of
the files came out right, as had been the case before.

But I still use OE because both versions come out right.

 

[mm]

Eudora does not change the content of attachments.

All I can tell you is what I wrote. We did many tests with 6 or 7
source files, including finally checking the length of the received
attachments. They were a couple hundred bytes shorter -- it varied --
than what I sent with Eudora. Heck, I like, I prefer Eudora too, and
that's why I spent so much time testing and answering questions before
I tried OE, which I dislike.

The attachments were in two alphabets, not just fonts but alphabets,
and when I say that one format came out right or the other came out
wrong, wrong means that words in the second alphabet just showed up as
question marks. As if the font letter images had been omitted when
emailing. But I don't know how fonts work, so I'm just guessing.

I haven't bothered to measure the length of attachments that display
correctly. I assume they are the same length as what was sent.

Should I report it to Eudora?