Alistair Davidson of Instant Badger writes that he’s been having some problems dealing with the format that Apple Mail uses:

This post is about a problem I’ve been having with a mail generated by Apple Mail, that has been driving me nuts. It’s not the first issue I’ve had with Apple Mail and it’s funky attachment formatting, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. However, it’s the most maddening to date!

It seems that the Apple Mail client does some strange formatting when you have multiple appledouble-encoded attachements. It appears that Apple Mail is missing the content type declaration when there is a second attachment.

This line is absolutely vital, as it not only declares that this part is in appledouble format, but more fundamentally it declares that this part is itself a multipart and is split with THIS boundary marker rather than any other.

If this line is missing, then ONLY the FIRST attachment gets recognised. Any subsequent attachments which don’t get the content-type header are then considered to be text/plain by default, so you get an email which has the first attachment properly parsed as an image, but everything after that appears inline as text. So anyone reading the email gets a big long string of base64 encoded image data. Not nice.

I’ve personally not been able to confirm this, but Alistair seems to have spent considerable time investigating.

Technorati Tags: apple, mail

One Comment

  1. recently I have some problems with apple mail – especially when I want to add an attachement (jpg file) to be sent … the mail program autamatically shrinks the file to a unusable format …. I working with Mac OSX Leopard