How do I view the attachments in this email?

Here are the instructions for mutt and pine users. Webmail users can simply click on the attachments, and if you use some other mailer you are assumed to be expert enough not to need this FAQ.

To read a message with attachments using mutt, highlight it and press ``v'' for ``view''. This gives you a list of all the parts of the email. At this point, you may need to press Ctrl-L to refresh the screen to ensure that you are seeing the complete list. Highlight the part you're interested in, and press Return to view it (if mutt can handle it) or ``s'' to save it to a file.

If you use pine and want to read a message with attachments, press ``v'', highlight the attachment and press ``s'' to save it in a file. If you are asked whether to overwrite or append, then the file you chose to save it to already exists. If you don't mind losing that file, choose Overwrite; otherwise, choose Cancel (Ctrl-C) and select another filename.

Sometimes a message will simply appear to be encoded, rather than being made up of a message body and attachments. This has even been known to happen with messages which, when decoded, proved to be ordinary plain text. These encoded messages probably result from configuration problems on the sender's end, and there's no general rule for decoding them. The best thing to do is to save the message to a file (use mutt's copy command or pine's export command), and try one of the following tools on the file. In these instructions, I'll refer to the original file as message.orig, and to the output file which should contain the decoded message as message.out.

• ``base64'' is an encoding scheme which produces blocks of characters like this:

  lra2NpfLFRkZubS09PT0JBKJiETi9PQ0k8nE4XBjY2O5ubmTk5OFhYUfHx/v7+9qtVqp
  VLJZ7M/PT7lc3tDQQCaTq6ura2pq6uvrKRQKiUQqLS0dGRmpra1FIBCXfy9jY2MvLi7O
  

  To decode it, edit message.orig to remove everything except the block of code, and then type ``base64 -d message.orig message.out''. message.out will now contain the decoded message.
• ``uudecode'' can be used to decode messages which look like this:

  begin 644 debian.txt
  M:'1T<#HO+VQI<W1S+F1E8FEA;BYO<F<O9&5B:6%N+61E=F5L+S(P,#$O9&5B
  M:6%N+61E=F5L+3(P,#$Q,B]M<V<P,3DW-RYH=&UL"@H@("TM+2TM+2TM+2TM
  [...]
  end
  

  Edit message.orig to remove everything before the ``begin'' and after the ``end'', then type ``uudecode message.orig''. The decoded message will go into the file given in the ``begin'' line (debian.txt in this example).

Once you think you've decoded the message, the ``file'' command may be useful. Typing ``file message.out'' will tell you what type of file the computer believes message.out to be. Sometimes it gets the details wrong, but if it says that the file is any sort of text, then you can safely read it without messing up your screen.