# How to retain email attachment format from FreeBSD to Win 10.



## dalpets (Nov 1, 2022)

The format of email attachments sent from FreeBSD to Win 10 is largely unreadable. Is there a configuration process to maintain the English format from one to the other?
If so, which operating system is that to be done in & what is the methodology?

Thanks


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## 6502 (Nov 1, 2022)

I think it is not problem with FreeBSD and Windows 10 but specific email clients. Try different email client for FBSD. What is attached - file, text?


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## SirDice (Nov 1, 2022)

dalpets said:


> The format of email attachments sent from FBSD to Win 10 is largely unreadable.


Typically MIME. 



dalpets said:


> Is there a configuration process to maintain the English format from one to the other?


Language has very little to do with the _format_ of the email. The SMTP protocol uses ASCII. There are several ways you could send an email in a different character set, but all of them rely on some translation to ASCII in order for it to be sent with SMTP. Encoding the text (and/or attachments) using base64 is the simplest way of doing that.


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## hruodr (Nov 1, 2022)

Summarized: it is a question of compliance of old and recognized standards by email clients. Nothing to do with
the OS except of its support of decent mail clients, and both, windows and FreeBSD do it.


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## dalpets (Nov 1, 2022)

6502 said:


> I think it is not problem with FreeBSD and Windows 10 but specific email clients. Try different email client for FBSD. What is attached - file, text?


text


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## SirDice (Nov 1, 2022)

dalpets said:


> text


Unicode, UTF-8, ASCII?


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## astyle (Nov 1, 2022)

I remember having that kind of problem in the past, but it was in the opposite direction - from winXP to Solaris. Nowadays, a decently recent version of sendmail will do a much better job of preserving the attached files, and not try to mangle text encodings.


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## 6502 (Nov 1, 2022)

Send a simple test email and post here the raw text of message. Maybe "text" is some type of document like .ODT?


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## chrbr (Nov 1, 2022)

As far as I remember there has been a program under cygwin which transferred an Outlook mailbox to the maildir or the mbox format. Depending on you issues this might be of some help. Unfortunately I do not remember its name.


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## astyle (Nov 3, 2022)

Very old mail servers (like from 2000 - 2005) might still mangle the outgoing emails. That's because text encodings and network packet formation were not properly buttoned up back then. With recent versions of just about all the software in the stack, mangling of emails and attachments is much less of an issue.


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## 6502 (Nov 3, 2022)

Show us example of the problem.


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