Hi George, Although I am replying to your email, this reply is intended as a general explanation of the winmail.dat issue to the list as a whole. I am writing this information up from memory, which is getting ever more fallible as the years pass, so some dates or version numbers may be incorrect, but the general sense of what I am trying to convey should not be adversely affected.
Diane, if you want to write this up as an article for the web sites, please feel free to do so, I just ask you give me attribution! First, understand that winmail.dat files only arise when a user sends mail from a Microsoft Outlook client through a Microsoft Exchange mail server AND has their account configured to send in 'Rich Format Text' format to the particular recipient they are writing to. RFT (not to be confused with the RTF format used as a markup language for text based documents) was developed by Microsoft long, long ago, before the use of HTML in email became ubiquitous. Microsoft wanted to provide some way for users to send rich emails, complete with embedded graphics and formatted text. Remember that in those days (around e early nineties), all email was plain text only! Because there were no widely accepted and used standards in those days, each mail client did their own thing. There were a few different solutions, Eudora had their own mark-up format, Setext was also developed and was most notably used by the TIDBits newsletter (I believe the setext edition was only recently discontinued). Microsoft developed their own far more capable, format and called it RFT. It was only ever implemented by Microsoft Exchange/Microsoft Outlook. It allowed the user to send mail containing formatting and embedded images and other documents in a way that seems so simple today, but was revolutionary some 15-20 years ago. Because it was a proprietary format, it could only be fully interpreted by other Microsoft Outlook clients. Other mail clients receiving such email received the formatting information and any embedded attachments in a winmail.dat file attached to a plain text version of the body of the email (sometimes, depending on the configuration of e mail client and server, this plain text version is missing). This was not a huge issue, because the use of Exchange was pretty much limited to enterprise level businesses, and was pretty much a standard between them, so most users of Outlook were communicating with other users of Outlook almost exclusively. Now, there are several settings that determine what format is used for mail sent out of Outlook/Exchange. The setting is stored in the 'contact' record that holds details of the contacts name, address, email etc. However there is a setting in Outlook which gives the default value for this format when a new contact is created. To further confuse things, the Exchange server can be configured to either impose a default on the client, or set the initial default when Outlook is first configured. Up until Outlook 2000, the choices for mail format were only Plain Text and RFT. After that time, HTML was added as a choice as well, but the standard 'out of the box' configuration had RFT as the default format. Later versions of Outlook and Exchange changed the default format to HTML, but unfortunately, and contacts already created in the earlier version retained the default format that they had been created with. So, even though the use of RFT has been deprecated for more than ten years, people are still receiving winmail.dat files in their email. Whether or not you get them from. A particular sender depends on several issues: first, what version of Outlook and Exchange the sender is using; how their Exchange server is configured for the defaults for new contacts; what setting they have applied to a particular contact (you!), which can be different for each individual contact; and, finally, what format they have selected for the individual email they are sending you today (which can have a different format imposed upon it on a case by case basis). Further complication arises when there are more than one recipient to the email, and the recipients have different format settings appli ed to the contact records! In some cases, RFT will dominate, in others HTML, and in still other cases, plain text - the permutations are enormous! All in all, you can see how easy it is to have some people say they have no problems and never get winmail.dat files from windows users, others say they always get them and some say they occasionally get them. The whole system is a mess! What can be done about it? Unfortunately, as a recipient all you can do is ask you recipient to change their default setting for their mail client AND the contact record they have for you to Plain Text or HTML. Doubly unfortunately, the setting for this are so deeply buried in the client and have moved around with each different version of Outlook it is difficult to give clear instruction to the sender on how to achieve this without knowing exactly what versions of Outlook and Exchange they are using. There are a couple of third party applications available to 'unpack' the winmail.dat format - most common of these was TNEFs Enough, but I don't know if that has been updated to be useable in the latest version of Snow Leopard. I seem to recall that gmail is able to decode these attachments on the fly, which explains why one of the original posters received proper files throughout he gmail interface, but winmail.dat files through POP mail received through Entourage (these would not go through the gmail unpacking process). Sorry for the long email, but I hope this explains the situation a little better and helps people understand why there is no simple fix for the mess! -- >From the iPad of Barry Wainwright On 19 Sep 2010, at 04:25, George <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, List -- On 09/18/10 11:27 PM (local time), Hendrik Velthuis > (<[email protected]>) wrote: > >> I don't think you understood what I said: >> >> The Senders are sending regular .xls and .xlsx files - everyone on PCs all >> over the world are receiving the files a-ok. >> >> The PROBLEM is in our new MacBooks - we're the only ones who can't receive >> through Mail or Entourage - and get the Winmail.dat files instead. > > I know this doesn't help much but, just so you know, I have a MacBookPro > running Entourage (via Office 2004 -- I did not update to Office 2008, but > will update to Office 2011, probably.....), and I receive email with > attached .xls, .xlsx, .doc, etc. from PC users regularly, and have no > problems at all. > > George A > > > -- > YouTalk mailing list > List information: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/support_options/list.html > List moderator: [email protected], [email protected] > To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe -- YouTalk mailing list List information: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/support_options/list.html List moderator: [email protected], [email protected] To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
