I have a problem when trying to retrieve attachements coming from outside servers on my IMAP server in MS Outlook.
Some of senders have Multipart content type and I have no problems getting attached files.
But some messages with attachments have Text /Plain Content type and attached file is not visible.
May somebody help - how to get attachments when message content type is not Multipart?
I have found the answer on my question on jguru board:
http://www.jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=1041227
The real problem was - content type could not be recognized and assumed as Plain/Text, because message was in uuencode.
Answer
First, uuencode/uudecode is not reliable (several characters vary in different implementations, and it is easy to damage, or incorrectly calculate/incompletely insert, the encoding). That's why MIME's base64 was invented.
Second, uuencoded content is simply pasted in the main message body and is not a "multipart" message (has no MIME structure) and hence does not contain "attachments" (multiple body parts), from the MIME point of view.
As far as actually doing the uuencode/decode operations... see the encode and decode methods of the MimeUtility class of the javax.mail.internet package.
