Winmail.dat ?

[redbaron_snoopy]

I'm getting internet mails at my office (Lotus Notus) with Winmail.dat attachments. My office PC is on Win2000.
Why is that and what can I use to read these attachments ?

[Statica]

winmail.dat is a file automatically generated by Exchange mail servers and programs like outlook and is as a result of Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF). This occurs if someone sends mail in rich text (lovely fonts and pretty background grafix etc etc). Basically mail is designed to be format-free plain text; anything else is an attachment. A lot of the mail programs use html to code up the pretty looking stuff, much like a web page, and includes a section below that is the body of the mail devoid of any formatting. Microsoft servers and clients on the other hand decide to include a file as an attachment that contains the plain text mail; the contents of which depend on the method of encoding done by the mail server.

[David_Jones]

Hi,

As Statica said, you cannot read them at your end, nor do you need to.

You should still be able to see all the plain text that yuor correspndent sent, just not the formatting that they applied at their end.

Solution To The Issue

To stop receiving them, you will need to ask them to change their mail settings as they relate to you.

Assuming that they are using Outlook and you are in their Contacts, ask them to open up your entry, right click on your email address, and de-select the tick box that says 'Always send to this recipient in Microsoft Outlook rich-text format'.

See the attachment

That should solve the problem, unless they have set up a global default to send *all* email in RTF (Rich Text Format), in which case the only way around it is to get them to change their global default (as far as I know).

Hope that helps,

David.