Suppose the first line in the attachment looks like this:
begin 664 vacation027.jpg
Sending File Attachments 285
13
This tells us that when it??™s decoded, we??™ll have a single JPG image, vacation027.jpg, when
we??™re done. You can UUEncode any number of files in a single instance.
When you get an email like this, save it as a file in your home directory. Leave it with no
extension (attach1). Then go to your shell and run the UUDecode program:
uudecode attach1
This will decode the attachment and produce the vacation027.jpg image in your home
directory. You should now see this file if you run the ls command, and you should be able
to open it. After you??™ve opened the decoded file, delete attach1.
MIME/Base64
MIME is the general Internet standard for formatting email. It includes the Base64
method for encoding file attachments, as well as messages using non-English characters.
Heinz Tschabitscher at About.com briefly describes what happens when you use Base64:
???Base64 encoding takes three bytes, each consisting of eight bits, and represents them as
four printable characters in the ASCII standard.
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