The attached PDF is missing when saving email message as a .eml in Finder

There is a reason that Apple Mail has a Save Attachments… menu item, because that .eml file is saved as ASCII text, and text files do not have attachments. Save the attached PDF, and the saved .eml file together in the same folder if you need to keep them together.

My previous input would save you having to do the following. Text files can have base64 encoded content appended to them, but it is not really an attachment in that sense.

When you save that email message as a .eml, it is an ASCII text file, and the PDF that was attached is transformed into included base64 encoded text such as this vastly abbreviated example of a PDF attachment that I received, which could be thousands of lines long, and in this particular case, 69371 lines of base64 encoding:

If I open this .eml in vi/vim and lets say the base64 encoding begins on line 95, I know that encoding will run through to the last line in the .eml, so in this particular case, if I want the PDF back, I must write the entire base64 encoding content to a text file. In vi/vim, I type ':' without the single quotes to get at the editor command line, and enter the following:

95,$w b64.txt
q!

That extracts the base64 encoding of the entire PDF out to a text file and then I quit the editor without changing anything.

In the Terminal command-line, I enter the following to decode the base64 encoded text back to a viewable PDF, which I then open in Preview:

base64 -d -i b64.txt -o foo.pdf
open foo.pdf