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'Bout Computers Those Funky Attachments Someone asked me about those strange attachments that occasionally come with emails named ATT000 something, usually a one or two digit number.htm (ATT0001.htm). I did some Googling and found a lot about attachments, but not much about those ATT0001.htm attachments. By now everyone should know it is not wise to click on an attachment to open it if you don't know what it is. Well, I know that, but I just had to find out what these ATT attachments really are. (They are not from AT&T!) I found some in My Documents I had inadvertently saved and scanned them with my antivirus and they came up clean, so I bravely opened them. Blank. Totally blank! So why are they there? Good question, I wish I knew! I looked at some old emails in an Outlook Express Identity that is set to read all emails in plain text. The emails don't show an attachment, but when I open the emails, there the attachment is listed, ATT00031.htm. So, on a whim I un-set the option to read emails in plain text and the mysterious ATT00031.htm is gone and a really nice picture shows up in the email. So I conclude that the picture was originally inserted into the email and not sent as an attachment. (How am I doing?) Apparently since the picture was inserted into the email and not sent as an attachment, the mysterious ATT0001.htm comes up. But now comes the interesting part. I decided to do some further testing. I went into OE Tools/Options and set everything again to the very highest security. No attachments, no html and everything in the Restricted sites zone. The same old ATT0001.htm again shows up as an attachment! I clicked it. The thing opened Firefox and the original email appears. So now I think (this is dangerous, me thinking!) this silly ATT0001.htm is just a web page with the email on it, the email must have been sent in rich text or html format. This still doesn't explain why the one saved in My Documents is blank! I tried opening it in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, still blank! But then I notice at the bottom of my screen it says Restricted Site. So something in my protection is probably saving my computer from getting something ugly! I right clicked on the file and selected Properties. Under the General tab that came up, I saw this notice: Security: This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer. There is a button to click that is labeled 'Unblock'. At this point I decide to leave well enough alone and close out the Properties dialog box. Further research came up with a very
interesting and very geeky site about decoding Internet attachments, A
Tutorial by Michael Santovec. This page is located here: I am still trying to understand all of this stuff. (But it really doesn't explain those ATT0001.htms!) Now while I was looking in My Documents for those ATT0001.htm files, I also found some files named ATT0001.jpg. Just plain old jpg files, but I wonder, why this strange name? Footnote: Since I have never seen this type of attachment in any email client except Outlook Express, I guess it is just an OE behavior. I also use Outlook 2003, Eudora 6.0.1.1 Paid version and the latest version of Thunderbird. They each have quirks, but not this one! Martha Bagwell is the Web Master for http://www.marthas-web.com , aka surfinmac or Mac |
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