amedia: Close-up on a shimmering laserdisc half-out of a laserdisc player. Caption: hopelessly geeky (geek)
amedia ([personal profile] amedia) wrote2005-08-12 09:46 pm
Entry tags:

help! insufficient geekitude

I hate to admit it, but I need help figuring out how to d/load a file. The person who sent it to me has just gone out of town, so while the most logical thing to do is to ask him nicely to re-send it in a different format, I can't do that for a week, and I'd really like to open it before then.



It was sent to my work email address (it is loosely work-related) which uses a Campus Pipeline web interface. It's supposed to be a rather large jpg. The attachment, as it appears in the email, is marked "type: multipart/appledouble." When I click on it and choose "open," a message tells me that Windows doesn't know how to open it. When I choose "save", the file tries to save itself as a document (the only other option is "all files"). If I save it as a document, I can read it with MS Word and I get this:

--Boundary_(ID_hRlg4k0Bj7CoxmFDb18n/g)
Content-type: application/applefile; name=_ADB2388.jpg
Content-transfer-encoding: base64
Content-disposition: inline; filename=_ADB2388.jpg

Followed by a string of gobbledygook which I assume is the encoded jpg. Simply retitling the document with a .jpg extension does not make it readable, alas.

Because of the reference to Apple I borrowed my son's laptop, accessed the email, and tried to download the file, with the exact same non-results.

I did some googling and learned that this is apparently a MIME file which for some reason is not transparent to my email client. I tried to get something called munpack from an FTP site but when I downloaded it Windows wouldn't run it.

I also tried forwarding the file to different email addresses. It won't forward from the original message. I tried attaching the downloaded file to messages to myself at gmail, Yahoo, and AOL, none of which did any better.

Any suggestions would be very very gratefully accepted!

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