open winmail.dat

N

Noël Marc

Hi,

Thought after buying microsoft office that there would be no problem to
open mails coming from win pcs
Entourage can't open the winmail.dat attachments??? coming from win pcs

Anyone a working solution?

Marc
 
B

Boettcher, Scott

Have the PC users change their email format in Outlook to either Rich Text
or HTML.

SB
 
M

mmmmark

I think you mean PLAIN text or html.

Rich text is the culprit in my experience. Rich text is ok _within_ the
exchange server's realm, but there is an Outlook preference to change the
Rich text to html when going to internet recipients.

There are advantages of using the Rich text or html formats over plain text
in corporate settings (e.g. embedded objects, tables, etc.).

-Mark
 
M

Michel Bintener

No, that's not entirely true. The winmail.dat files are created precisely
BECAUSE Outlook users encode their messages in rich text format (aka. RTF).
So in one aspect, you were right, Scott, changing the message to HTML will
make the problem disappear, as will plain text format.

Noël, simply ask your colleagues to send you messages in HTML or plain text
only. If I remember correctly, there's even an option in Outlook's address
book to assign a preferred encoding format to specific recipients.

Have a look at this website for more instructions:
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/attachments.html#att7

Michel
 
M

Michel Bintener

Scott,
I posted my reply as soon as I'd read your post; I then refreshed the
newsgroup window only to find that Mark had already pointed it out to you.
Of course, I had seen that one in time, I would not have posted myself. In
spite of the fact that there is a one minute time difference between my and
Mark's posts, they were both written roughly at the same time, so there was
no malignity or pedantry on my side involved. For once. ;)

Anyway, let's just look on the bright side: Noël now knows for sure why he's
experiencing the winmail.dat problem!

Michel
 
B

Boettcher, Scott

Sorry Michel,

Any apparent 'tude on my part wasn't intended - I realized that you posted
about the same time I did - just letting the OP know that yes, my brain once
again has gone to sleep.
The ironic thing is that I spent a tone of time dealing with/researching
this particular issue - which was why I replied to it...only using the wrong
answer!

:) SB
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

No one has mentioned yet that for the messages where it's too late - they
were sent in RTF (Rich Text Format) and have those winmail.dat attachments,
you can open the winmail.dat things via a free utility called "TNEF's
Enough" (OS X version) you ca get at versiontracker.

Note that in 98% of the time, there's nothing there: the winmail.dat
attachment is just the encoded RTF stuff. But in the 2% of messages that
contain real attachments, they're swallowed up in the winmail.dat. In these
cases, using TNEF's Enough will extract the real attachment.

as the others say, none of this occurs if the sender sends to you in Plain
Text or HTML. The problem is that every version of Outlook up to 2002 (XP),
but not the most recent 2003, sends in RTF format by default. You should
alert the senders that they can set your contact (in their Contacts folder
in Outlook) to "Send email in Plain Text" so they don't have to remember -
it will happen automatically. And senders in Outlook 2003 probably won't
have the issue in the first place since the default format there is HTML.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
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