Rescue Email Attachments

Sometime you receive an email with an attachment that is carried by mistake directly in the body of the email, and consists of a bunch of garbled characters (see encoding attachments). You can sometimes retrieve the attachments with a decompression program.

Decompression programs can sometimes rescue an inline attachment by carrying out the following process. First, save the whole message as a text file onto your desktop. Then open the text file with a decompression utility like WinZip or Stuffit. Sometimes the utility will recognize the file as a compressed file, and decode the file for you into the original attachment.

Gerald Boyd's "How To Do Just About Anything By Email" (Part 1, Part 2) also describes how to use the older UUDECODE utility to read email attachments.