Eudora attachments and corruption

 

Let's suppose that Linus sits up all Halloween night in the pumpkin patch awaiting the arrival of the Great Pumpkin. Let's also suppose that this year he's prepared to obtain proof positive of the existence of the Great Pumpkin... He sits poised among the pumpkins with his trusty digital camera, and when the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch... Click! FLASH! And Linus rushes excitedly home to download the image to his computer, email it as an attachment to the rest of the gang, and prove once and for all that he's not crazy, that the Great Pumpkin really does exist!

What is Charlie Brown to do when he receives the email from Linus, and sees this?

 

What does "One or more attachments were corrupt" mean? Well, corrupt in this context does not refer to the character of the message sender. (We all know that Linus is a person of the highest personal integrity, surpassed in this regard only by Charlie Brown himself). What "corrupt" means here is that the attached file (the digital image of the Great Pumpkin) is either incomplete or damaged. This corruption is not common, but can occur at any point along the message's journey, at either the sender's or recipient's end, or in transit between the two.

So how does Charlie Brown get from here (this message about corruption) to there (the radiant image of the Great Pumpkin flying across his screen)?

The first thing Charlie Brown should do is follow the instructions in the message itself. The "Fetch" button is the one with the downward-pointing arrow, in the upper right corneer of the message window next to the trash can. Now when he checks mail again he should again receive the message, only this time with a "raw" (or encoded) version of the attachment in the body of the message. While "raw" and "encoded" might seem to be contradictory terms, a bit of background may help clarify things. When a computer file (word processing document, spreadsheet, or in this case, digital image) is sent as an email attachment, it is first encoded, or translated, from its native file format to plain text for transport across the internet to its destination. Once the message reaches its destination, it is "decoded," or converted from plain text back to its native format on the recipient's computer. This process normally takes place automatically in the background. What Charlie Brown is doing by following the directions above is downloading the message again, only this time without the automatic decoding process. In other words, the attachment is downloaded in its still-encoded (or not de-coded, thus raw) format. Because Eudora splits very large message into several smaller ones, he may end up with several "Great Pumpkin" messages, the first of which should start out something like this:

--============_-1304959379==_============
Content-Id: <b237e64bb160v04003a00@[128.32.173.1].0.0>
Content-Type: application/mac-binhex40; name="Great Pumpkin.GIF"
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Great Pumpkin.GIF"
modification-date="Wed, 30 Sep 1998 06:44:43 -0700"

(This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)

followed by pages and pages of what appears to be garbage text like this:

:#NPZG'9bELjLEA!!3Ne3F%T@9e)!!!!$XiS!!!!!9Xp#6BUc!`!!!!!!'J-!!!`
!!!!Q!VB"!3!)!!3#$JBC#J36+`394aF6#c`5$"-80M380KXp$4a!*K8c3aK,28N
l$%Nl*%Nq-d8m4J--E!-`D4)LDM-QDK92@493F6&+CNK+CJ8BP`BeP4JTPc8XQ4*
0M""1T6e*MMa,TMjU-$a`8M4EDM&iCL"KIN9FIbYTGc1$GaPQM6PNM8TRK%PJMak
'L%5&Ke"[L%q2L3j`S5TZSMTQScYiRdaYP%aQT%alPNKjU5'%S#@DRdU%R%LBS&+

This text is actually the attachment in its encoded (raw) form. What Charlie Brown must now do is decode the attachment, or convert it back to its native format. Here's how he'll do it:

• Select the message(s) in the In box containing the "raw" version of the attachment. Since attachments can often be large, they may be spread across several messages. Highlight all of them.
  
• Select "Save As..." from Eudora's File menu.
  
  
• Uncheck both the "Guess Paragraphs" and "Include Headers" checkboxes.
  
• Navigate to a convenient folder to save the attachment, name the file and click Save. (The "raw" file being saved is a temporary one and can be named anything other than the actual name of the attached file.
  
• Find and open the folder containing the Stuffit Expander (Mac) application. It should be located in the Utilities folder.
  
• Drag the saved temporary file onto the Stuffit Expander icon. Stuffit Expander should then open, convert the file to it's native format, and exit.

Charlie Brown can now attempt to open the decoded file. If he is unable to do so, he should ask Linus to re-send the attachment, since the original was most likely damaged in transit or was corrupt even before being sent. In the case of the latter, we would hope that Linus had made a backup copy of the most important file ever to inhabit his computer's hard drive. If not, it's another year of waiting and then back to the pumpkin patch...

Note: While these instructions apply specifically to Eudora on the Macintosh, the process should be similar for PC users: In Eudora's In box, right-click the summary of the message in question, then select "Change Server Status" and then "Fetch" from the resulting popup menu. The steps following this one should be similar to those on the Macintosh, but if you have any questions regarding the process, please feel free to consult your friendly neighborhood LSCR representative.