July 22, 1999

Attachments: Common Problems and Solutions

roblem: Unknown type of file

You are using a PC and have received an e-mail message with an attached file, which shows up as a small icon on the bottom of the message. You click on the icon, expecting to be able to view the document immediately. Instead, a window opens on your screen asking you to choose a program for opening the file. You are lost: What program should you select? (And why in the world are you being asked to make this decision?)

Solution: The source of your troubles lies in the name of the file -- it probably does not have an extension at the end, like .doc or .jpg, which tells the Windows operating system what type of file it is trying to open. That is a common problem for people who receive Macintosh files, which can be rendered without extensions for use on Macs but are unidentifiable to most PC's.

If you suspect that the file is a photograph or other image, you may want to choose a graphics viewer, like Adobe Photoshop or even Netscape, to open it. (To choose the viewer, you may need to dig through folders to find the appropriate program -- not an easy task for novices.) Or you may simply want to ask the sender to send you the file again, with a name that includes the appropriate extension.

Problem: File needs to be decoded or decompressed

You expect to receive several attachments at once, but instead you receive one large file that has a MIME (or .mim) extension. What is MIME, and how are you supposed to deal with it?

Solution: MIME, which stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, is a standard encoding method for transmitting non-text files over the Internet. Many people never have to deal with MIME files -- let alone know what MIME means -- because their e-mail programs handle such files automatically. But if you are an AOL user getting a group of attachments in one e-mail message from a non-AOL user, the attachments will arrive as one MIME file, and you will need to unbundle the attachments yourself, which requires separate software. AOL recommends Winzip at www.winzip.com, which will decode MIME files and also decompress files that have arrived in your box with .zip extensions. Another option, of course, is to tell the sender to send each attachment again in separate e-mail messages.

Problem: Software incompatibility

You have received an attachment that contains a Microsoft Word document, and you have Microsoft Word on your computer. But when the file is opened in Word, it is riddled with gibberish.

Solution: The document you have received was probably created in a different version of Word. It might have been written in Microsoft Word 97, for example, and you have Word 95. Tell the sender to save the file in an older format and try again. Or if the sender does not need to send the file with specialized fonts, ask for the file to be saved and sent as a plain-text document; alternatively, the text of the file can simply be pasted into e-mail and sent that way.