Hi RamyMahrous,

thanks for your suggestion. For now, I've been able to solve the problem of coding the pdf into pure text as was included in my first post.

Base64 is what's used to code the pdf into ASCII format for mail transfer and I found there is a method in .net called Convert.ToBase64String() that takes a string and converts it to base64. So I read the pdf to be used as an attachment into an array of bytes and passed this array of bytes as the argument of the Convert.ToBase64String() method. The method returns a string which I subsequently inserted at the appropriate position into my .eml template. I think that will suffice for my purpose

Thanks for your co-operation.