The dreaded winmail.dat attachment
I had occasion at work today to be very grateful for TNEF’s Enough, a utility that decodes those annoying winmail.dat files which Exchange Server users send you when you are marked in their contacts as someone who accepts messages in RTF.
You know the kind of situation. The information that you need for a meeting arrives by email 15 minutes before the meeting starts. Bad enough.
To add to the drama, it is all crammed inside one of those winmail.dat files that Mail can’t process. The Registrar with whom you are meeting is a die-hard PC fan. He thinks that Mac computers are just glorified iPods. He’s gagging for me to come in and say I can’t get at the stuff on my MacBook Pro. It becomes a point of honour.
Thankfully, TNEF’s Enough handles these files very well. Save off the winmail.dat file, open it in Enough and there are your attachments, readable once more.
It’s like magic. You can get TNEF’s Enough from the developer’s web site 
. Who would be without it?
Related posts
August 29th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
[...] Sooner or later, all Mail.app users who have any kind of email communication with Outlook users will get a message containing the dreaded unopenable winmail.dat file. [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Another solution is using one of the online converter, like http://www.winmaildat.com .
Cheers
May 16th, 2007 at 12:04 am
As long as there are Microsoft Outlook users out there who do not compose their emails in plain text, we can still expect to see to those winmail.dat files, specifically if we are using a different email client program.
Fortunately, there are free tools that can help. One good example is the freeware Winmail Opener.