Multipart/mixed attachment in multiple mails? (IE (Yahoo))

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Dear members of this board,
is there any chance I could recover the attachments from the mail below, sent to my google address, without having to ask the sender to send it again with I-unfortunately-don’t-know-what-settings-changed?
FWIW: when I forward this mail to my work (Netscape 4.7. – not my choice), the forwarded message is shown as ‘part1.2’. Previous attempts to mail the files to my work e-mail address failed: the message never showed up at all… He sent it on CD via postal service too, but that got lost too…
Haunted files they must be…

In Yahoo, the mail presents itself like:

(…header…)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 07:57:27 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_0029_01C4A78C.4BF08350″
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2720.3000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2727.1300

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

——=_NextPart_000_0029_01C4A78C.4BF08350
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_001_002A_01C4A78C.4BF08350″

——=_NextPart_001_002A_01C4A78C.4BF08350
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=”iso-8859-1″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
(…mail body…)
——=_NextPart_001_002A_01C4A78C.4BF08350
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=”iso-8859-1″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

(… mail body again, this time surrounded by html/… code …)
>

——=_NextPart_001_002A_01C4A78C.4BF08350–

——=_NextPart_000_0029_01C4A78C.4BF08350
Content-Type: application/msword;
name=”P01 – Instrumentarium-IMZ.doc”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=”P01 – Instrumentarium-IMZ.doc”

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAALgAAAAAAAAAA
(… lines and lines of, I guess encrypted, content …)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAA

——=_NextPart_000_0029_01C4A78C.4BF08350
Content-Type: application/msword;
name=”P02 – Water.doc”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=”P02 – Water.doc”

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAATQAAAAAAAAAA
(…etc etc etc…)

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If you can forward the e-mail to an e-mail client (OE, Thunderbird, Pegasus…) that can save the WHOLE message as a text file, then it may be possible.

Save the e-mail as a plain text file with the extension of .uue.

This file should be able to be opened in Winzip with all the files extractable.

If you can’t get it to an e-mail client like that, you can try and copy the entire text from your Gmail acount and paste it into a blank Notepad file and save it as a uue file that way.

Then try and open it with winzip.

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Yes! It worked (good enough *)! Thanks, Brian, for the tip.

And Jefferson, thanks for the explanation too.
FYI: Dan’s mail format site (a pretty informative site, BTW) offers a link to an online Base64 Decoder but unfortunately, I didn’t have time to figure out how to use it properly (to achieve, e.g., the intact original Word document).

* FWIW: I managed to recover all attachments. I applied your method in a ‘dirty’ way, as one part didn’t unzip properly (result was the same txt file again). Herefore, I merged the content (text describing mails & attachments) of both in one file and omitted the second part’s ‘mail’-text in the middle, so that the last line of the last file of part 1 was followed by the beginning (= file description with first line …_NextPart…) of the first file of part 2. As such, the result was one .uue text file containing once the mail’s text followed by a sequence of – only – the attachments. Running Winzip, an error was generated, probably because the multipart parameters in the text weren’t adapted properly – I had no time to sort it all out. But the result was OK (only the mail text had to be extracted manually).

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Yes! It worked (good enough *)! Thanks, Brian, for the tip.

And Jefferson, thanks for the explanation too.
FYI: Dan’s mail format site (a pretty informative site, BTW) offers a link to an online Base64 Decoder but unfortunately, I didn’t have time to figure out how to use it properly (to achieve, e.g., the intact original Word document).

* FWIW: I managed to recover all attachments. I applied your method in a ‘dirty’ way, as one part didn’t unzip properly (result was the same txt file again). Herefore, I merged the content (text describing mails & attachments) of both in one file and omitted the second part’s ‘mail’-text in the middle, so that the last line of the last file of part 1 was followed by the beginning (= file description with first line …_NextPart…) of the first file of part 2. As such, the result was one .uue text file containing once the mail’s text followed by a sequence of – only – the attachments. Running Winzip, an error was generated, probably because the multipart parameters in the text weren’t adapted properly – I had no time to sort it all out. But the result was OK (only the mail text had to be extracted manually).

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If you can forward the e-mail to an e-mail client (OE, Thunderbird, Pegasus…) that can save the WHOLE message as a text file, then it may be possible.

Save the e-mail as a plain text file with the extension of .uue.

This file should be able to be opened in Winzip with all the files extractable.

If you can’t get it to an e-mail client like that, you can try and copy the entire text from your Gmail acount and paste it into a blank Notepad file and save it as a uue file that way.

Then try and open it with winzip.

Reply | Quote

The attachments are base64 encoded. This is simply a way to represent all characters using the basic “Internet-compatible” character set; there is no high-tech encryption on the data. There are base64 decoders available, although there aren’t any I can recommend in particular. (I know that when you create a CDATA field in XML, it is base64 encoded, but I can’t figure out a way to use that information to conver it back to a .DOC file. )

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The attachments are base64 encoded. This is simply a way to represent all characters using the basic “Internet-compatible” character set; there is no high-tech encryption on the data. There are base64 decoders available, although there aren’t any I can recommend in particular. (I know that when you create a CDATA field in XML, it is base64 encoded, but I can’t figure out a way to use that information to conver it back to a .DOC file. )

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