To those who replied .Many Thanks,you stirred the mud betwwen my ears:-)) The attachment was telling mutt it was an 'application octet-stream'. Adding a line application/octet-stream; /usr/bin/acroread '%s' etc etc in /etc/mailcap worked fine Thank you all. -- russ linux.conf.au 2003 The Australian Linux Technical Conference http://linux.conf.au/ 22-25 January 2003 in Perth, Western Australia