Entourage wiht GMail and winmail.dat

[Dr Q]

Hi,

I have read several of the previous postings on how the winmail.dat
file gets created.

I use GMail as my primary email account and download via pop mail
using Entourage version 11.3.3 on Mac OS 10.4.10. On those messages
where the attachment comes across as winmail.dat, I have noticed that
I can go to GMail via the web interface and the attachments can be
found in the correct format (i.e. PDF, DOC, XLS, etc.) and
subsequently downloaded or viewed.

Why is it that GMail can identify the attachments correctly but when I
download them to Entourage they become winmail.dat?

Thanks in advance for the explanation.

Also I did download TNEF and it did decode the winmail.dat so I am
really just looking to understand why the winmail.dat shows up only
when it gets download by Entourage.

 

[Jolly Roger]

Why is it that GMail can identify the attachments correctly but when I
download them to Entourage they become winmail.dat?

They don't *become* winmail.dat - they always were winmail.dat, just as
Microsoft Outlook created them:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winmail.dat>

I'll answer your question with another question:

Why *should* all other email clients have to support some crazy format
Microsoft dreamed up that often contains nothing more than
Outlook-specific things like formatting instructions, forms, and
meeting requests?

In my mind, expecting all the other email applications on the planet to
magically know what to do with (or care about) a Microsoft proprietary
attachment format used only by Microsoft Outlook is not only
unrealistic - it's flat-out unreasonable.

--
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filter.

JR

 

[Dr Q]

So does that mean that the programmers have figured out how to
translate Winmail.dat because what I see are the attachments in there
native format?

 

[Jolly Roger]

So does that mean that the programmers have figured out how to
translate Winmail.dat because what I see are the attachments in there
native format?

Probably, yes.

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JR