On Sunday, June 1, 2003 at 18:00 (which was Sunday, June 1, 2003 at 8:00 where I am) Allister Jenks [AJ] wrote:
AJ> A guy who normally sends me <200k HTML emails, this time sent me a AJ> whopping 1.5Mb email that had about 1.5k of text and a AJ> Winmail.dat. Welcome to the world of Microsoft. AJ> I can see from snooping into the file it is created by Outlook and AJ> I have asked him to deal with the problem. The senders of mails with winmail.dat attachments are usually totally unaware that their mail-client is sending these. Therefore, asking them to deal with it will not usually render much result as they are unaware that there is a problem. After all, they never see this attachment on either incoming or outgoing mail. AJ> However, I'd like to understand what this file is and, if AJ> possible, how/why Outlook creates it and how to stop it. Outlook incorrectly assumes that all recipients you are in contact with are also using outlook. As soon as Outlook thinks it needs to send additional information with an e-mail, or if the sender adds attachments, these get encoded into MS/TNEF format which only Microsoft's e-mail software recognizes (AFAIK, I have heard that the new release of the GroupWise Internet Agent will support this, apparently Novell decided to support this non-standard attachment type to get rid of all the support calls I guess this must generate). There is a tool called Fentun (http://www.fentun.com/) which is free and which will allow you to open winmail.dat files and extract the attachments stores within it. Note that smaller winmail.dat files usually contain nothing but additional MS-proprietary mail attributes and no attachments, in which case Fentun will show now file-list. -- Greetings, Maurice Using The Bat! v1.63 Beta/7 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 3 ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62r | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
