Different mail encoding schemes and the way to get what you want out
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If you have file attached to an incoming mail message, it is most likely
encoded.  You can tell if you look at the attachment and all you see is a
header and a bunch of ASCII garbage following.  Every OS and every mail
system has it's own way of encoding binary files for mail transfer.  The
most common ones are uuencode, base64, and binhex.  You can tell how your
attachment is encoded by looking at the header of the attachment.  It should
say "Content-Transfer Encoding: " and the name of the encoding scheme.  If
it is one of the mentioned coding schemes above, the following techniques
ought to work.

First save the attachment by itself in its own subdirectory.

The best way to deal with either uuencoded files or base64 files is to open
the mail file in pine or another mail tool that understands these formats,
such as netscape messenger.

otherwise mimencode ought to be able to decode bother of them.

The problem with this is that you will have to edit the files and cut out
the individual binaries, then use

mimencode -u <filename> -o <output>

where <filename> is the name of the ASCII encoded binary, and output is the
output file.

binhex
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The executable binhex ought to work.

binhex <filename>

should put the binaries into the current directory.  I haven't tried this as
of yet, if you get a binhexed file and this works or doesn't, let me know.

Another alternative is to use mae (The macintosh emulator) and use stuffit
expander to open the file.  I'd rather get binhex to work myself.