This one is fun kiddies! Well, actually it is quite easy once you know what to remove and what not to remove.
First, drag and drop the message to the Desktop. I use the Desktop a lot because its a bit faster to do this and once I'm finished, I delete the message.
Make sure you can see the file extension. For email it will be .eml, and for news it will be .nws. If you don't, open Windows Explorer.
Click on the Tools (or View) menu and select Folder Options.
Click on the View tab sheet.
In the list, select Show all files
(Note: For Windows XP, it is Show Hidden Files and Folders)
Uncheck the Hide file extensions for known file types.
Click Apply then OK and close Windows Explorer if you wish.
Now, click on or highlight (if you are using the hover option) the message you dragged to the Desktop.
Here you can do one of two things:
1) Open Notepad and open the file.
2) Press F2 to rename it, then change the .eml or .nws extension to .txt instead. If you use this one, when you change it you will be asked if you wish to change th extension, select Yes. Now just double click on the file to open it in Notepad or WordPad (depending on the file size and which OS you are running).
When the file opens, scroll down till you see something similar to the following:
------=_NextPart_000_01ED_01C1BFDC.8EDAAA50
Content-Type: application/x-msdownload;
name="NumLockOn.exe"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="NumLockOn.exe"
TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAA
AAAAuAAAAA4fug4AtAnNIbgBTM0hVGhpcyBwcm9ncmFG1v
.......
.......
.......
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==
------=_NextPart_000_01ED_01C1BFDC.8EDAAA50--
As you can see, you find the filename, a mess of text and letters followed by the ending.
In this example, you see the following line:
------=_NextPart_001_01EE_01C1BFDC.8EDAAA50--
above and below the garbage looking text. This lets you know where the file that is attached begins and ends. These lines MUST match each other. They will be different on each file attachment but the Content lines and filename will be similar each time.
The junk in the middle will be the file attachment in it's encoded form unless it's a text file or message and them you can read the contents of it. Some attachments like the latter would be a forwarded mail message or an inserted text file. Only binary files will be encoded. Email and news messages are text only and to be able to send a binary file, it must be encoded into text so it can be sent. The receiving program can then include the decoding ability or the file is saved externally and decoded using another program.
Back to removing the attachment part of the message. What you do now is highlight the top line shown above all the way to the bottom line. You can put your cursor at the first character and click and hold the mouse down and drag the cursor to the bottom line to highlight it or click on the first character, then scroll down to the last character in the bottom line and press and the SHIFT key then click the mouse on the last character. This will highlight all of it as well and is a bit faster.
Now, press the Delete key to remove it.
Ok, one more thing to remove.
Near the top, you should see several lines that contain the same NextPart lines.
------=_NextPart_000_01ED_01C1BFDC.8EDAAA50
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_001_01EE_01C1BFDC.8EDAAA50"
Highlight and delete them. Again, these NextPart lines must match the attachments lines.
This is part of the headers to show where the attachment begins and ends so it too must be removed.
If there are more than one attachment, each will be removed in a similar process. The two parts are deleted.
Now, you're ready to save the file. If you used a .txt extension, after saving, rename the .txt to .eml and drag and drop it back into a Outlook Express mail folder.
The message will show without the attachment and you can now remove the message that contains the attachment without loss of text.