Problems with Macintosh Download

Some members have had problems with reading email archive files that they have downloaded on a Macintosh. Ray Reeder has done some research on this and has an answer.

Ray stated his problem as follows: when he clicked on an email archive file to download his mac would ask him to pick a file name to download to. (normal operation is that the file is presented on the browser as readable text.)

When he gave his browser a filename to use it would move the file to his Mac, but his word processor would not allow him to open it, thus he could not read or search the document.

This is not terribly surprising since Macs look at the first bytes of each file to determine which application can use them. Since we do not put any special control characters on these files his Mac was becoming confused by the lack of this information.

After some discussion with others on the email digest Ray resolved the problem as follows:

It seemed most likely to me that it was a NetScape preferences problem, but it appeared that I did have the application preference for Plain Text set to Netscape (internal).

Closer examination revealed that I had two preference listings for Plain Text. Deleting one of them removed ambiguity for the browser, and setting the preference to application - Microsoft Word produced a Word document (openable, searchable, etc.), even when the active choice was Netscape itself.

Finally, including the suffix .tex (after .txt did nothing) to the list of suffixes in the edit dialog for the Plain Text application preference produced a download of the archive to a display on the browser screen.

So the fix sequence from the Navigator window is EDIT / PREFERENCED / NAVIGATOR / APPLICATIONS / PLAIN TEXT / EDIT / add .tex to the list of suffixes and select Netscape (internal) as the preferred choice of application.

Thanks for sorting that out, Ray! Webmaster