Annoying winmail.dat attachments – a two minute fix
Recently I’ve been receiving more and more emails that, instead of having normal attachments, have a file called winmail.dat. This is apparently Microsoft thinking they don’t have to conform to standards, and can send things in whatever format they like instead of a format that can be read by all mail clients.
Luckily there are quick ways to extract the files from winmail.dat.
The secure way is with a little program called TNEF. It’s free and can be downloaded from here.
Alternatively if it’s not that private, a guy called Balázs Bárány has made a nice little page that lets your winmail.dat file, and then let you download the files that are hidden within. It can be found here. I just went through the process in 25 seconds. Not a bad fix until Microsoft plays nice with their mail standards.
I wouldn’t count on Microsoft changing their standards anytime soon. Winmail.Dat has been around forever and no amount of complaining by us “little people” has made them change it yet.
I long ago told people that if they wanted to email me to send it in “Plain Text” (the default for Outlook is to send everything in “Rich Text”, which ends up wrapping things into that annoying Winmail.Dat attachment). If they send to you in Plain Text, no Winmail.Dat ! Sure your emails won’t have pretty fonts and colors, but really….are you missing out there? Um… No.
Found your site via the LetoPrime forum (I’m using the same theme on my blog). Regards.
http://www.winmaildat.com is another online opener for winmail.dat attachments.
Regards