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Why am I getting Winmail.dat files on my mac from Windows users?

Written by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com on January 12, 2009 – 12:20 am -

Jodi writes in:

I wasn’t sure who I should contact about this, so i am sending this to you. As of late, word attachments coming from my friend on a Windows XP Machine appear as “winmail.dat” files.
When I try to open these, the text runs about 150pp long, (it’s a 4page doc) and the text looks like this:
?<‡META †[1]0 ?Xt=”‡$.
It shows garbage like that over and over again. Admin Can you help me open them? If I forward the message on to a windows user it is fine! What gives?
Jodi have been dealing with this one for a while and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when they appear and when they don’t appear. We investigated the possibility of drag and drop causing it - but that wasn’t it consistently. But we found a utility called TNEF’s Enough for our Mac friends here:
You can simply drag winmail.dat into this application and BAM! There is your data ma’am, can we do anything else for you today?
UPDATE: Fix this on your exchange 2007 server by doing this:

On the exchange server, go to global settings, Internet Message Formats, Default Properties, Advanced tab, for “Exchange Rich-Text Format” select “Never Use”.

This will prevent your Exchangeserver from using Rich-Text Format and creating winmail.dat files.

From TNEF’s website:

TNEF’s Enough allows Macs to read and extract files from Microsoft TNEF stream files. The files are usually received by SMTP based e-mail programs from Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook users. The SMTP based e-mail program will usually receive either a MIME attachment named “winmail.dat” or a MIME attachment with the type “application/ms-tnef.”

The file is a rich text (or MAPI) message that is sent from Outlook to Exchange. When Exchange sends the message to an outside server it writes the MAPI message as a MIME attachment. The unfortunate side effect of this plan is if the Outlook user has someone in their address book as a person who can receive “Rich Text” then the user will receive the TNEF file whether the user uses Outlook or not.

TNEF’s Enough is a freeware application

_TheMac’nAdmiN_

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20 Responses to “Why am I getting Winmail.dat files on my mac from Windows users?”

  1. By Unknown on Sep 28, 2007 | Reply

    Ha How has MS survived this long? By doing things just like this that makes people either run away screaming from MS or say lets just use all MS products and keep our fingers crossed that they play nicely…

    I am really starting to love UBUNTU!

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  2. By The Slothman on Sep 28, 2007 | Reply

    This problem also exists in Lotus Notes.

    Here is the fix we used here for Lotus Notes to be able to open the Winmail.dat files.

    Lotus Notes Fix

    Also, there is a couple third party tools, that are free for the most part.

    Fentun

    WMDECODE

    I’ve found that the Lotus Notes fix above does not always extract the attachment, so I have to try Fentun or WMDECODE. One of those tools will inevitably extract the attachments that are contained within the winmail.dat file.

    I forgot to mention that I despise the audacity of MS to create this file because it ASSUMES that Outlook, or Outlook Express is on the other end, basically telling all other mail programs to go ‘F’ themselves.

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  3. By The Slothman on Sep 28, 2007 | Reply

    PS: Here’s an official release from IBM/Lotus on this.

    Fix to TNEF

    You’ll notice they mention the same stuff I do, as I originally got the info from their forums.

    PS: I don’t run that release/fix of Notes so I don’t have that ability to fix the problem on the fly.

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  4. By Karl L. Gechlik on Sep 28, 2007 | Reply

    Ha How has MS survived this long? By doing things just like this that makes people either run away screaming from MS or say lets just use all MS products and keep our fingers crossed that they play nicely…

    I am really starting to love UBUNTU!

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  5. By Unknown on Oct 26, 2007 | Reply

    You can also try the Mail.app Plug-in OMiC from http://www.restoroot.com” “>http://www.restoroot.com” REL=”nofollow”> “>http://www.restoroot.com “> “>http://www.restoroot.com to work with winmail.dat files

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  6. By Unknown on Oct 26, 2007 | Reply

    You can also try the Mail.app Plug-in OMiC from http://www.restoroot.com” “>http://www.restoroot.com” REL=”nofollow”> “>http://www.restoroot.com “> “>http://www.restoroot.com to work with winmail.dat files

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  7. By Christopher on Oct 26, 2007 | Reply

    You can also try the Mail.app Plug-in OMiC from http://www.restoroot.com to work with winmail.dat files

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  8. By Unknown on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply

    The most convenient winmail.dat decoder for Windows is http://www.eolsoft.com/freeware/winmail_opener/” “>http://www.eolsoft.com/freeware/winmail_opener/” REL=”nofollow”>Winmail Opener

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  9. By Unknown on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply

    The most convenient winmail.dat decoder for Windows is http://www.eolsoft.com/freeware/winmail_opener/” “>http://www.eolsoft.com/freeware/winmail_opener/” REL=”nofollow”>Winmail Opener

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  10. By llx on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply

    The most convenient winmail.dat decoder for Windows is Winmail Opener

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  11. By llx on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply

    The most convenient winmail.dat decoder for Windows is Winmail Opener

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  12. By Unknown on Feb 14, 2008 | Reply

    Good read thanks for the info

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  13. By Shawn T Lippert on Feb 14, 2008 | Reply

    Good read thanks for the info

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  14. By fastbullet on Jan 20, 2009 | Reply

    More recently than the above, I have begun to get Email attachments in a .eml format that my Linux computer won’t open. It turns out that this is another brilliant MS idea that seems to originate in Outlook and is seemingly only something that Outlook handles.

    My solution, so far, has been either to send the Email back to where it came from or simply delete it, unopened.

    Has anyone discovered a Linux-compatible app for this crap?

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

    Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
    January 20th, 2009 at 12:51 pm

    Let me take a look around for you FastBullet!

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

    fastbullet Reply:
    January 20th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

    TYVM !!

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  15. By fastbullet on Jan 27, 2009 | Reply

    Only now did I get back here to find the link you left, Karl. I hope you didn’t think I’d lost interest or was too ignorant to respond.
    I’ll give this little gem a try and let everyone know about the results.

    I appreciate you taking the time to hunt this down.

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

    Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
    January 29th, 2009 at 5:43 am

    No problemo! Let us know how it goes.

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

  16. By NinjaAdmin on Feb 4, 2009 | Reply

    Just found out:

    On the exchange server, go to global settings, Internet Message Formats, Default Properties, Advanced tab, for “Exchange Rich-Text Format” select “Never Use”.

    This will prevent your Exchange server from using Rich-Text Format and creating winmail.dat files.

    [Click to Reply to This Comment.]

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