I have a sony cybershot dscf707 camera (love it!) and the titanium mac
powerbook with g3 processor and os9.2. lately I've had problems with
recipients not being able to open pics I email. they are jpegs when I
send them but are recieved as .dat and other weird formats. I'm
sending them in 640X480 or 1280X 960 resolution settings.

sometimes if I send them directly from the camera they'll go through,
generally what I'll do is drag them from the flash stick to the
computer & then attach to emails. Any toughts?
Thank you, Lloyd

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Request for Question Clarification by mvguy-ga on 05 Aug 2003 22:03 PDT

What program are you using to send e-mail? Would you be willing to use
a different e-mail client?  Thanks.

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Clarification of Question by maskfly-ga on 05 Aug 2003 23:23 PDT

I am using netscape 7.0 and earthlink. What's confusing here is the
people I used to be able to send the pictures used to open them as
jpeg and all of a sudden they can't. I did upgrade to netscape 7.0
some time ago but am not sure if that's when this all changed.
Thank you

I'm sorry I don't know the answer to your question either.  But I did
a doubletake when you said you used Earthlink .... just the other day
I forwarded a picture to my boyfriend (in the next room), just a .jpg
attachment as always, and he couldn't see it either.  Very strange.  I
also use Earthlink.  It also came in as a .dat file.  Do you suppose
something strange is going on with Earthlink?

Anyway, he resaved the file on his computer as a .jpg and was then
able to see it.  So it's a mystery still, and I'll be watching your
question to see if someone can clear it up.  But in the meantime, you
might suggest to your friends that they re-save the pics as .jpgs and
see if that helps.  Good luck.

In Byrd's suggestion, I believe what your friends can do is save the
.dat file that is attached, then rename them to the original filename
you sent, such as .jpg. See if that recovers the file.

I also suspect that something may be wrong with the mail server of
Earthlink. A friend once sent Word files to his employer, but the
employer received only .dat files. They later found that a router on
the network that the employer used was defective. A few packets of
data that were part of the attached file were lost because of the bad
connection caused by the malfunctioning router. Something of the sort
might be your problem here.

maybe earthlink stores attachments as temporary .dat files, which
arent renamed due to a config error. or maybe its a way to bypass some
more security systems. who knows?

The problem you are having actually has to do with the person who is
receiving your email (and the way you are sending it).

Files on your Mac (that are not text files) actually have two parts: a
resource fork and a data fork.  The .DAT file that your recipient is
receiving is simply the data fork of the file.  (Note that this is
half of the file and is really useless).

So then why couldn't the recipient receive the whole file?  This is
because there is an incompatibility between the way your email program
'encoded' the attachment and the way your recipient 'decoded' it. 
Most often these problems occur when sending a Mac encoded document to
a PC user or to someone using AOL. (They typically occur with
Microsoft outlook though, I havn't experienced this problem on
Netscape.)  Bascially, the recipient's program cannot decode the
AppleDouble format that the Mac program used to encode the attachment.

The way to fix the problem is simple in theory.  Either change the way
your mail program is encoding its attachments, or have your recipients
use an alternate mail program to interpret your attachments.  Netscape
does not make it easy to chaneg the encoding.  (Microsoft Entourage,
on teh other hand, has a drop down menu in the preferences to simply
choose which enocding type you want).  I could not find a similar
method to change the type of encoding in netscape.  (You may want to
fool around with opetion to use MIME encoding in your messages -- see
Preferences --> Mail & newsgroups -->  Composition)

Alternatievly, use Stuffit to encode the file prior to transfer.  If
you can encode the file as binhex, the file won't have two parts
anymore and can be sent easier.  Sending a SIT file may be easier as
well.

The best way to test my thepry is to send a message to yourself with
an attachment.  If you can open it and see the picture then you know
the problem is "encoding" and not your internet provider.  Otherwise
upgrade to a better mail program like Microsoft Entourage.

zip your jpegs and then send them over. It has worked for me

Paul

Many ISPs and firewalls will change the file extension as a security
measure.  The user will have to manually change the file extension to
the proper format, in this case JPEG/JPG to view the image.