Outlook clear on the winmail.dat problem

My colleagues and I keep getting e-mail messages with the same attached file: winmail.dat. We thought the problem was related to the fact that we used Macintoshes, but have since discovered that some people on PCs running Windows have the same problem. All we are trying to do is receive image files from clients. Sometimes the files we receive are fine, other times we cannot do anything with them.

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This is a fairly familiar problem, and for the most part simple to fix, but how you do that may depend on how well you know your clients. The problem stems from the way image files and other binary data is handled. We send these items today as attachments, but that was not always possible.

For those who have been sending e-mail for years, there was a time when it was all pure text or ASCII. Microsoft was one of many computer vendors that missed the internet completely.

When it finally woke up to the fact that the internet was here to stay, it tried to use its monopolistic control of the desktop to force people to do things its way. Microsoft met with mixed success, but luckily it began to approach things in a more 'universal' way.

The problem you have is a direct result of the way Microsoft's Outlook mail client used to handle things. In older versions, sending binary files from one Outlook client to another was not a problem. When Outlook wants you to retain the 'look and feel' of a document, it allows you to send it in Rich Text Format (RTF). Unfortunately, when it does this, it has to send data for something called the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF). This information is sent from one Outlook client to another with a file called winmail.dat.

So long as the recipient is also using Outlook, there is no problem. This has nothing to do with the OS itself.

In versions of Outlook before 2003, it can be difficult to handle. Your client is therefore using an older form of Outlook and sending files as RTFs. You can solve this problem in a number of ways.

Get your client to upgrade Outlook. Persuade him to send all mail as plain text instead of RTF. Pass the file through an Outlook client at your office and then resend it with an updated version.

Experience tells me that trying to get a client to do something he is not accustomed to doing is too much pain for minimal results. It is far better to solve the problem at your end.

If you are on a Mac and you want to decode the winmail.dat file, you can get TNEF's Enough. This will convert the files into something useful.

One problem I did encounter was that the resulting jpegs could not be opened with Apple's Preview but could with Adobe's Photoshop.

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