You'll then be asked for a file name. Exit mail to return to your host system's command line. Because the file has been encoded for mail delivery, you now have to run a decoder. Uudecode will create a new, uncompressed file. One further complication comes when you request a particularly long file.
Many Net sites can only handle so much mail at a time.
This gives the mail server the maximum size, in bytes, of each file segment. This particular size is good for UUCP sites. Internet and Bitnet sites can generally go up to 300000. When you get all of these files in mail, transfer them to your home directory. You can then run uudecode, tar, etc.