kishorebhargava

Every now and then I get an email message which contains a strange attachment, the attachment is always called winmail.dat it has had me perplexed several times and for many years. At one stage a client of mine kept insisting that they have sent me the attachments but all I got was a winmail.dat and did not have any idea of what to do with it.

Well, apparently the file is created by some of the newer versions of Microsoft Outlook which assumes that the program you are trying to read the mail in is incapable of reading “Rich Text Format” (RTF) so it converts the attachment to contain this information. Microsoft has a knowledge base article on how to prevent this from happening:

How to prevent the Winmail.dat file from being sent to Internet Users http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138053

But what do you do if you still get these attachments and they still contain data that you may need? Well, I found a nice way to crack this. Check the following site out:

http://tud.at/php/tnef/index.php

This place gives you the option to upload your file via the browser, extracts the information for you, and when you have finished downloading it, you can delete the files. Of course, if you are paranoid about putting up your files on someone else’s server then just go ahead and download the TNEF utility for yourself and extract the files on your own machine. Works like a charm, you’ll be surprised as to what all the winmail.dat file can actually contain! I got a bunch of useful attachments out of it!

Cheers…Kishore
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