Unattached

A short while ago I emailed the Home Office with an enquiry about the National ID Card scheme only to have my message bounced as undeliverable. Well, it seems that they did receive my message after all, for today I received a reply...

Thank you for your e-mail enquiry of 18 October 2005.
A reply is attached.

<Standard disclaimer thingy snipped>

begin 666 ResponseT37499 5.doc^M
MT,\1X*&Q&N$`````````````````````/@`#`/[_"0`&```````````````"
M````& ``````````$ ``(@````$```#^____`````!<```" ````________
M____________________________________________________________
M____________________________________________________________
M____________________________________________________________

<Loads more encoded stuff deleted -- you get the general idea>

Clearly they have written a reply in MS Word, tried to attach the file (why, oh why, can't people simply write an email rather than sending around documents in a proprietory and inefficient format?) and failed horribly somehow. The client I used to read this mail, by the way, was GMail, which I haven't previously experienced having trouble with attachments.

I've tried various tricks to access the file, including running uudecode over the file, but no joy. So I have replied to the reply, requesting the respondent reposts the relevent response (!). We'll see what happens. Watch this space...