I receive a lot of attachments of all kinds: .doc, .xls, .txt, .zip, .jpg, .pdf — you name it. These all work just fine, and it’s wonderful that Gmail allows me to view many online with just a click, and sends some to Google Docs, if I ask it to.
However, once in a while, and with certain correspondents Gmail has a glitch. Somehow, for some reason it doesn’t recognise a perfectly good attachment, and instead presents it to me as something called ‘noname’.
When I first received one of these many months ago it gave me a massive headache. After much googling I found out how to handle it, and intended to write it up for the blog. I was too busy though and the post never happened.
Then I received another, and had no memory of how I dealt with it the first time. After much hair-pulling I finally solved it again.
The post still didn’t come to be though, so today, now I have yet another ‘noname’ attachment, I’m determined to write it up.
After a few false starts I found a solution that worked for me at: Retrieve GMail’s “noname” attachments —
There is a bug in Google Mail that sometimes gives you “noname” attachments, bizarrely encoded (it’s called “appledouble”), when sent from a Mac. Google have been made aware of the problem in March 2007 and are… hum… “working on it”. Here you can upload those files and retrieve them decoded
Upload your ‘noname’ attachment and click OK. After a moment or two you see a link to download the converted file.
I found that trying to download the ‘noname’ attachment through Gmail’s web interface just didn’t work well. When I switched to Apple’s Mail.app I was able to save the attachment without difficulty.
If you’re not keen on having some unknown third party decode your attachment the script that handles the conversion is available for download.
For a more detailed explanation of the form polish up your French and refer to Upload de fichiers, pour tester le plugin form.js – jQuery.info.
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