I was confused by your answer regarding winmail.dat. The file cannot be opened traditionally, at least to obtain what the receiver believes to be valuable contents. Rather, it’s used internally by Outlook to determine how to format the text. Mail systems that don’t understand how to use the information display it as an attachment. It’s been a confusion for years.
I was confused by your answer regarding winmail.dat. The file cannot be opened traditionally, at least to obtain what the receiver believes to be valuable contents. Rather, it’s used internally by Outlook to determine how to format the text. Mail systems that don’t understand how to use the information display it as an attachment. It’s been a confusion for years. Microsoft explains how to avoid the issue here.
That column generated lots of e-mail.
My answer was about how to extract file contents when a winmail.dat file arrives in your in-box. You are correct, sending the mail as plain text in the first place solves the problems.
The utilities I pointed to are needed only when you have to get into an attachment that cannot be re-sent in plain text.
The most interesting solution from a reader was to open the winmail.dat file in Notepad to identify the correct filename for the attachment, then re-name the winmail.dat file with the correct extension and then open with the appropriate application. This is reported to work for all Office file types and even others.
