On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 08:01 PM, Mike Watkins corrected: > I think that winmail I asked about came from Beth Ernst, not Susan > Chapman. Otherwise, my question remains the same. Thanks.
Some Microsoft e-mail programs such as Outlook can send e-mail in a rich text format that is peculiar to Microsoft. The rich text format allows formatting such as bold and italic. There is a setting in those programs to send a plain text version of a message along with a winmail.dat file containing the fancy formatting information. E-mail programs incapable of interpreting Microsoft's rich text methods show the plain text message. Some of Microsoft's e-mail programs can use the winmail.dat attachment to enhance the plain text message with the fancy formatting. The information contained within the winmail.dat is described in this Microsoft technical document. <http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q241538> For those of us who don't use Microsoft e-mail programs, they're only a nuisance. For those who do use Microsoft e-mail programs, you might want to reconsider because the winmail.dat file contains some information you might rather be private. This is from the document I linked above. "...the path to your personal folders file (PST) file and your logon name are embedded in the winmail.dat file. Although this data is not explicitly exposed to the recipient, if the recipient opens the winmail.dat file for editing in a binary or text editor, he can see the path and logon name..." I peeked at the winmail.dat file in question with BBEdit, and the promised information is indeed obvious. There must be a good reason for embedding this information in every e-mail message. After all, we all know security at Microsoft is job one. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be March 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
