Winmail.dat

[John Fuller]

Anyone have any idea if Microsoft is aware of the difficulty opening a
winmail.dat file is on a mac? Is there a secret translator they already have
for this and I just don't know how to search for it?

Is there anyone who has a PC friend sending messages through outlook or
outlook express who finds none of microsoft's Mac products will open and
convert these files?

Am I the only one with this problem?

Will Microsoft ever acknowledge or address this?

Just (frustratedly) curious... (Any thoughts would be hugely appreciated!!)

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi John -

As I understand it there is nothing in those files for the recipient, so
opening them is unnecessary. They contain RTF data used by Exchange Server.
You might want to take a look at these:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197064

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q138053/

http://www.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Unfortunately, that's not always true.

1) Every message sent from Outlook in RTF mode (but see 5, 6 and 7 below)
has a winmail.dat attachment when received in any other email program.

2) It's true that if no actual attachment was included, then the winmail.dat
has nothing.

3) However, if the sender included a real attachment, that attachment is
"wrapped" into the winmail.dat. So you do have to open it to find out if
there's a real attachment or nothing there - unless you know for a fact that
the sender did not send an attachment (or you don't care).

4) You _can_ open winmail.dat files by getting a freeware utility called
"TNEF's Enough", which you can find at http://www.versiontracker.com . (Make
sure to download the OS X version.)

5) Exchange servers can be, and often are, configured to automatically strip
the winmail.dat by converting the messages to plain txt. So you get the real
attachments. If any of your regular correspondents are in Outlook on
Exchange, they can ask their IT person to do this.

6) Outlook has a feature whereby contacts have a setting "Send mail in plain
text only". You can ask your regular correspondents to enable this setting
in your contact, Then you will never get winmail.dat from them again.

7) winmail.dat appears only when the sender sends in RTF mode, which was the
default for Outlook up to 2002 version. You can suggest to your
correspondents that they switch their default mode to HTML (in
Tools/Options/Email/Compose) for email if they like formatted text, or plain
text otherwise. The default in Outlook 2003 (and later to come) is now HTML,
not RTF. So gradually this problem will disappear as more people upgrade.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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