Do you know anyone with gmail? I see that the people who had been given accounts were on ebay selling accounts for huge sums, but now that there are more than 3000 accounts for sale, the price is more like $10. Still around $50 on trademe.

Gmail is in a testing phase - people known to goolge, such as by having a blog on blogger.com, have been invited to sign up for a gmail account and to bring in four friends if they like - it is these "friend" accounts which are being sold off, plus there are stories that people inside google are doling accounts out to their mates. There is no official word on when gmail will be available to the public and if at least one of the possible corporate options for google eventuates (takeover by microsoft), we might never see it.

// me

heh. scenester.

Well, as suggested by the MIME time, it would normally be an application, ie. a program. Maybe a self-extracting zip file or a virus.

If you like just forward the sucker to me and I'll have a look. jetjaguar@nonwrestler.com

If not, I guess the classic computer support questions are:

What are you trying to do?

What do you see when you try to do it?

I've found that the mime/type can be broken by the web browser when people upload files via a web form - eg a pdf uploaded by mozilla on linux gets recognized as application/octet-stream by the server but the same pdf uploaded by IE on Windows is recognized correctly by the same server.

I think the file is probably an mp3, especially if you were expecting one from the guy who sent it.

// Does this attachment have no file name with appropriate suffix to help in identifying it?

And if that ain't obvious in Yahoo, can't you download it to your PC without opening it? Windows (assuming that's what you're using) may then tell you more information about it, at the least if you right-click the file and choose "properties".