[dba-Tech] Puzzling Attachments

On 13 Nov 2005 at 22:25, Arthur Fuller wrote:

> I have tried to send pics to various friends, whose various email
> clients, and I'm not sure who uses which. But several friends have
> replied that the JPGs I send arrive as files called winmail.dat rather
> than Myfile.JPG. I have no idea how to fix this issue, nor even an
> idea which email clients create winmail.dat. I think hotmail is one of
> the guilty parties, but I could be wrong about that. Anyone know which
> clients create the attachment named winmail.dat? Is it exactly the
> same attachment (JPG) that I sent? In that case a simple rename would
> fix the issue. But I don't know. What if I archive the JPG first?
> Presumably the result would still be named winmail.dat, but it might
> be the archive file as it was sent. Any suggestions? TIA, Arthur
> 

You are creating them yourself in Outlook.

Winmail.dat is a TNEF file create by MS Outlook.
TNEF is a proprietary  MS format (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format) used to 
encode data sent between MS mail clients.  Very few if any non-MS email clients can 
decode these attachments and not even all MS applications can. They are a PITA.

Try googling TNEF to see what the rest of the world thinks of them :-)

They are created  by Outlook when you have the option "Microsoft Outlook Rich Text" 
selected as your mail format, either as a default or for an individual address in your 
address book.

You need to check your options, and all your address book entries to ensure that you 
send emails to everyone either as  "Plain text" or "HTML".