Nov 21 2008
Files with No Extension
What’s up with people sending files with no extension? At least once a week someone sends me a file without an extension. Sometimes I can fix it by adding an .rtf or .doc extension. Sometimes I can’t.
How do people manage to send files without extensions? How do they lose the file extension by sending it as an attachment? And if the file somewhere along the line loses its extension, why wouldn’t they fix it before they send it off?
It’s annoying.
See comments for updates.
That has never happened to me. Forward me a couple of those emails: I may be able to figure out what’s going on.
No extension => delete.
Becasue only a few white people are still stuck in the past with Windoze.
What’s Windows have to do with it? All operating systems depend on file extensions in order to quickly know how to process the file.
I probably get more than the average number of attached files. I don’t think I’ve ever received an attachment that didn’t have a file extension.
What email client are you using?
I use Gmail. My emails also go through Yahoo Mail. I just checked my Yahoo account and the attachment shows up there with a .doc attachment.
So Gmail has been removing the extensions all this time?
Why?
I think there may be a bit more to it: gmail has never removed extensions from my files, including .doc ones.
I downloaded the original file which, as it turns out, was a .doc file.
I then sent it from a different account to my Gmail account.
It showed up with the extension this time.
So I don’t know what’s going on.
Does it go to the gmail first or yahoo?
It goes to Gmail first.
You’re just making this up to get attention. And it’s working.
Jody, are you able to trace the route of any emails sent to me? Does an email first go through the mudsongs.org server? If so, maybe that’s where things are going wrong. I dunno.
What email to you have forwarded to what? The mudsongs one gets forwarded to where? And then where do you forward it, etc?
As far as I know, the mudsongs email address is forwarded from the mudsongs server to both Gmail and Yahoo. That’s it. Neither Gmail or Yahoo forward anything.
So something is happening at the mudsongs server, or Gmail, or both.
So do both gmail and yahoo strip the extension, or just gmail, and only sometimes?
I haven’t paid close enough attention. Hold on, let me check… (I love it that Yahoo has an “attachment” link that displays every attachment I’ve ever sent or received. Does Gmail have that feature? It should.)
Son of a gun. It only happens with Gmail.
I’ll come back to this post the next time it happens.