No attachment – Winmail.dat instead (OL 2000)

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Hi all,

From about 6 months to date I started receiving feedback from mail recipients that they were not receiving attachments. I don’t know for how long this has been true, as you know it’s very hard to get good information from mail recipients.
Some of them told me that they were receiving a Winmail.dat file instead of the original attachment. On one occasion I got one of the recipients to forward the mail containing the Winmail.dat file back to me.
The former attachment was a zip file, so I saved Winmail.dat and renamed to Winmail.zip. To my surprise, it worked and I could retrieve the zipped files without any problem. But the size of the zipped file differed slightly from that of the Winmail.dat (Winmail.zip then).
What I did not test is the way of inserting the attachment into the mail. What I mean is, you can go to Insert | File, browse, select the file; or you can directly drag a file onto an open mail message. There’s even a third way: right clicking on a file and Sending To an e-mail. Whether these variants have anything to do I don’t know.
I’ll eventually end up uploading the files to a server and then mailing the link to my recipients. It’s terribly annoying and time-consuming.

I really believe this behavior has to do with OL2000, but I’d never heard of it before. Does anyone have a clue? I’ll really appreciate any input.
Thanks

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The message is being sent in RTF (rich text) format. If you are not deliberately choosing this format, or replying to a message in this format, check the contact record (or the reply address) to see if RTF is specified there. Most mail clients cannot process RTF properly.

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The message is being sent in RTF (rich text) format. If you are not deliberately choosing this format, or replying to a message in this format, check the contact record (or the reply address) to see if RTF is specified there. Most mail clients cannot process RTF properly.

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Hi Diegol… I just did some advanced training on Outlook 2002 to a deskside support department last month and found an article on KB regarding winmail.dat which I found most interesting… the link is as follows:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…;Product=ol2002[/url]

If you want to get even more involved with the winmail.dat and TNEF this article will help explain the whole process even more in depth:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…;Product=ol2002[/url]

I find that using HTML as the default mail format is the most successful when sending mail through the internet. There is one ‘bug’, however, with HTML – if someone sends you an e-mail in HTML format with an attachment – there is no indication that an attachment is included in the e-mail when you print the e-mail (Rich Text format prints an icon of the attachment and the filename. Microsoft confirmed this to be a bug and sent me a hotfix for this when I was contracting at a company last year… not sure if they have packaged it in a service release yet though. As long as you are aware of the problems with the different mail formats. Hope this helps a bit… have a good one! trish

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Trish,

Your links didn’t make it to your reply intact. To refer to a Knowledge Base article, you can use one of these forms:

[mskb=123456]
support.microsoft.com/?kbid=123456
descriptive text

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Hi Hans… how is my sweetheart? Anyhow… thanx for the heads up… I tried using the descriptive URL link in the Markup Tags, but obviously something went very wrong. I fixed them for now… will need to research Woody’s on proper insertion of URL links, I keep getting suggestions and obviously haven’t quite figured out yet. Have a great day…. by the way when do you sleep?

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Hello Trish,

Thanks for fixing the URLs, they work fine now.

I sleep at night, like most people, but my time zone is 8 hours ahead of yours

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Hello Trish,

Thanks for fixing the URLs, they work fine now.

I sleep at night, like most people, but my time zone is 8 hours ahead of yours

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Hi Hans… how is my sweetheart? Anyhow… thanx for the heads up… I tried using the descriptive URL link in the Markup Tags, but obviously something went very wrong. I fixed them for now… will need to research Woody’s on proper insertion of URL links, I keep getting suggestions and obviously haven’t quite figured out yet. Have a great day…. by the way when do you sleep?

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Trish,

Your links didn’t make it to your reply intact. To refer to a Knowledge Base article, you can use one of these forms:

[mskb=123456]
support.microsoft.com/?kbid=123456
descriptive text

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Trish, I’m sorry to say those links didn’t work. I hope you have the numbers in your browser history and can edit those in. You can use the special tag [mskb=number] to generate links in the format Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 197064.

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This is driving me nuts. A user (on AOL) keeps reporting that my message shows a winmail.dat file (the attachment was supposed to be PDF). The user’s address profile shows to send in ‘let Outlook decide…’. But the user still gets winmail. My Outlook msg format shows HTML.

Is there another solution?

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Have you tried sending a plain text message with an attachment?

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Yes, and I believe that was successful. What is confusing here is that these problems seem to have started when I upgraded to Adobe professional version 7.

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Bill, which version of Outlook?

What do you have here: Tools>Options…, Mail Format, Internet Format…, the center drop-down. If it says “Rich Text” try changing it to Plain Text or HTML.

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I have Outlook 2003. As far as mail format is concerned, it shows HTML.

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Trish, I’m sorry to say those links didn’t work. I hope you have the numbers in your browser history and can edit those in. You can use the special tag [mskb=number] to generate links in the format Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 197064.

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Hey Trish,

Thanks so much for taking the time to fix the links. I’ve been out all day and am kinda tired, but at a glance the problem seems to be my configuring msgs to be sent in the RTF format. In fact I do, as I find RTF far more fashionable than plain text and somewhat more versatile and less grotesque than the HTML format. Seems I’ll be using plain text from now on…
Jeff, thank you too for your help. I think changing the format will do. In case it doesn’t, you’ll have me posting back

Thank you

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Hey Trish,

Thanks so much for taking the time to fix the links. I’ve been out all day and am kinda tired, but at a glance the problem seems to be my configuring msgs to be sent in the RTF format. In fact I do, as I find RTF far more fashionable than plain text and somewhat more versatile and less grotesque than the HTML format. Seems I’ll be using plain text from now on…
Jeff, thank you too for your help. I think changing the format will do. In case it doesn’t, you’ll have me posting back

Thank you

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Hi Trish,

I know it’s been a while but I finally got round to reading the KB articles and they’re great. Thanks!

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Hi Trish,

I know it’s been a while but I finally got round to reading the KB articles and they’re great. Thanks!

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The other little ‘annoyance’ of using HTML format with Outlook messages is that if you save a sent message to a task or calendar item, end-of-paragraph marks produce double spacing in the other outlook items (and also on the receiver’s email if his/her email client does not handle HTML).

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The other little ‘annoyance’ of using HTML format with Outlook messages is that if you save a sent message to a task or calendar item, end-of-paragraph marks produce double spacing in the other outlook items (and also on the receiver’s email if his/her email client does not handle HTML).

Reply | Quote

Hi Diegol… I just did some advanced training on Outlook 2002 to a deskside support department last month and found an article on KB regarding winmail.dat which I found most interesting… the link is as follows:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…;Product=ol2002[/url]

If you want to get even more involved with the winmail.dat and TNEF this article will help explain the whole process even more in depth:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…;Product=ol2002[/url]

I find that using HTML as the default mail format is the most successful when sending mail through the internet. There is one ‘bug’, however, with HTML – if someone sends you an e-mail in HTML format with an attachment – there is no indication that an attachment is included in the e-mail when you print the e-mail (Rich Text format prints an icon of the attachment and the filename. Microsoft confirmed this to be a bug and sent me a hotfix for this when I was contracting at a company last year… not sure if they have packaged it in a service release yet though. As long as you are aware of the problems with the different mail formats. Hope this helps a bit… have a good one! trish

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