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User profile for user: Daniel Kiechle
Daniel Kiechle Author
User level: Level 1
95 points

Mail changes attachment extension

This is so weird... I'm sending an email with two attachments (Word 2004 documents). The file names are

Compréhension de l'écrit B, 2.doc
Expression écrite A, 1 et 2.doc

For some reason, Mail insists on appending a "0" (zero) to the file extension of the first file name, making it ".doc0"' (the second one is left intact). First, I thought it had something to do with using accented characters and commas in file names, but again, the second file name is perfectly fine and its extension does not get changed.

Several recipients use Macs, and there it's not an issue, but WIndows users have a problem because their system refuses to open the file unless they get rid of the "0" and thus restore the proper extension first.

Does anyone have a clue why Mail adds this character to the extension?

Daniel

Dual 1GHz G4 PM and 15" MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Feb 22, 2008 2:39 PM

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68 replies
User profile for user: Hecke
Hecke
User level: Level 1
0 points

Feb 27, 2008 12:08 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

I can confirm this behaviour. This strange effect occours after updating to 10.5.2.
At may side especially pdf attachements extensions are randomly changed to something like "pdf0, pdfa, pdfr, ..."

I have also no idea what causes this behaviour or how to fix it.

Well, unfortunately no help, but at least a confirmation of the situation.

Someone in this forum kows more about it and how to fix it?

Best regards

Joerg
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User profile for user: arjello
arjello
User level: Level 1
10 points

Mar 7, 2008 1:58 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Hi, I have recognized this on a machine here to. But I found out, that sometimes it has something to do with the file name. We are sending files with German "Umlaute" like "ü" (hüppe.pdf) in the file name (Mac users are used to use the computer not to think about). This files .pdf get a "0" at the end ".pdf0". If we change the filename to "hueppe.pdf" everything works fine. I recognized to, that blanks are also leading to this error. Exp. file name "hueppe show.pdf" -> "hueppe show.pdf0".
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User profile for user: MACPollo
MACPollo
User level: Level 1
0 points

Mar 10, 2008 3:05 AM in response to arjello

I can confirm the same situation here. It seems to have something to do with non-English characters such as ó, á... (or the previous mentioned umlaut for that matter), but I wasn't able to detect a clear pattern of when this happens. It just happens in some files.

Meanwhile I am sending my attachments without these chars.

Hope that Apple helps.
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User profile for user: Daniel Kiechle
Daniel Kiechle Author
User level: Level 1
95 points

Mar 10, 2008 4:39 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Thanks to all who have responded thus far. I am not sure whether accented characters and spaces are an issue, but what I can say is that I have seen a character added to an extension with file names as simple as "file.doc"; it is possible that having foreign accents increases the odds of it happening, but at least in my case, not using spaces and accents does not prevent the problem. By the same token, sometimes everything is just fine even though the file name contains several accented characters.

This is a truly annoying bug; if absolutely everyone were affected by it, I cannot believe that the issue would not be discussed a great deal more than it is. This leads me to believe that only a few people are affected. Still, I do hope Apple gets around to fixing this one really soon; I mean, not being able to properly send attachments is not a trivial issue!

Daniel
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User profile for user: bohejl
bohejl
User level: Level 1
4 points

Mar 17, 2008 9:22 AM in response to Danielle Desnoyers

The same thing here. However, very strange, I have not had this problem before today, although I have sent lots of attached files from Mail with 10.5.2. I did the attachment differently today, however, I used the attach button instead of drag and drop. I got a dialogue that asked if I wanted to format attachments Windows-friendly and I accepted that.

I think that I can reproduce that drag and drop does not change the extension, but using the attachment button tends to add a random character.
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Mail changes attachment extension

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