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We have created a utily that - using MIME - allows us to send emails using the VMS MAIL utility that include various types of file as an attachment. So far it works for PDF, text xls, doc and zip files.

However we are unable to get it to work for the newer .xlsx excel files. We can send it OK and when you open the email up it all looks as it should, the little .xlsx icon is right there etc ... But when we actually click on it to try to open it up , excel simply says the file is in an unreadable format.

I wonder if anyone has any experience of getting this to work ok or can suggest a solution.

user2699504
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  • Wasn't this answered in the OpenVMS forum at hp, with a link to a MS web page? Following that, it seems that "xlsx, application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet, Base64" is what you want to try in your MIME$FILETYPES.DAT – user2116290 Aug 20 '13 at 16:18

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Ok, so here is the answer to my own question.

First of all the VMS engineer guys are accepting that mime has a bug which prevents it from encoding native .xlsx (and possibly other new office format files).

The workaround we did was to zip the .xlsx with a recent version (circa 2006) of zip on our openVMS box, using the "-V" option. We could then "mimeify" the zip and send on using VMS Mail. We found that we could then open the zip in the target email client and read the attached .xlsx spreadsheet OK.

user2699504
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