[geeks] GMAIL and Macintosh attachments

[Kurt Huhn]

On Sep 22, 2004, at 9:23 AM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

> Hello fellow Mac lovers :-)
>
> I needed to have someone send me a program for my Mac that was about 5 
> meg.
> Since this would blow out my normal mailbox, I decided to try a gmail
> account.
>

SMTP is not a file transfer protocal.  ;-)

> He sent me the file from his macintosh using his regular macintosh
> mailer. It sent the file as two AppleDouble pieces from one program
> called "Installer". GMAIL shows the attachment as 2 seperate files
> "Installer" and "%Installer" and only lets me download them seperately.

That's the application and the resource forks.  They're two files, yes. 
  However, they only make sense when used in context, and without 
passing through a non-filesystem transfer mechanism.  Anything that 
disassociates the resource forks from the application will Bad Things 
to happen - this includes SFTP/SSH, FTP, SMTP, UNIX cp/mv, etc.

In order to preserve resource forks so that you can use one of the 
above transfer methods, you need to make a Stuffit archive or a disk 
image.  There are GUI and CLI utilities for both.

--
Kurt Huhn
kurt at k-huhn.com