Mail.app converts attachments to inline garbled text

#1 hsmultimedia

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Joined: 03-July 01

Posted 30 April 2012 - 01:51 AM

A new problem has appeared all of a sudden: Sometimes, mail.app converts attachments to garbled inline text. This goes for images, Word docs and pdfs, and mail.app’s message viewer says that there are no attachments.

I use an IMAP service, and the attachments appear as they should on the server, and my iPhone also receives the attachments properly.

But when I forward emails with these attachments either from the IMAP website or the iPhone, mail.app receives the email, displays the number of attachments for a brief moment in the message viewer, and then removes the number again.

To make things more complicated, this only happens with some emails, but apparently also when these same emails are sent again or forwarded. Other emails arrive as they should including attachments.

I’m running osx 10.6.8 on a 27" iMac (mid 2011) and mail.app 4.5

Suggestions would be very welcome!

#2 bastion

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Posted 01 May 2012 - 05:18 AM

hsmultimedia, on 30 April 2012 - 01:51 AM, said:

The "garbled text" you're seeing is almost certainly the 7-bit encoded representation of the attached data. The very first thing I'd look at is the View > Message submenu and see if it's just been set, somehow, to show the raw source of the mail in question. Failing that, if the problem started recently and you didn't change anything on your desktop then my next inclination is to think the mail is subtly malformed in such a way that the attachments aren't being recognized as such by the desktop e-mail client (even though they apparently are by the mobile client and the webmail interface). For example maybe the content type indicator is wrong or missing and the different clients you use respond to that in different ways. Is there any commonality you can readily see among the ones that exhibit this problem? Do they all come from one source? Do they come from multiple sources but using the same mail client?

This post has been edited by bastion: 01 May 2012 - 05:18 AM

#3 hsmultimedia

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Group: Members
Posts: 337
Joined: 03-July 01

Posted 01 May 2012 - 06:25 AM

bastion, on 01 May 2012 - 05:18 AM, said:

hsmultimedia, on 30 April 2012 - 01:51 AM, said:

Thanks for your reply! At this particular moment, the problem seems to have solved itself - at least when I forward these emails from my own webmail to myself and open them in mail.app. Yesterday, the forwarded emails behaved just like the originals.

The problem emails came from two different sources. The only thing I can see that differs from other emails is that when choosing View > Message > Long headers, the headers only contain one piece of information, namely "content type", whereas the long header of other emails are very long, with all kinds of information.